Chapter 23: Chapter 4 – Part 6

“They don’t know we’re here,” Wren said, repeating herself for maybe the third time, as the Daedalus was jostled into a static position by the maglock system.  “They don’t know it’s us.  They would have shot us to pieces the second we shifted back.”  Her big, light brown eyes stared ahead, not at the display screens but out of the rarely-opened front viewport to the medium-sized space station ahead.  If it was going to end in a hail of gunfire, she wanted to see it coming.

 

“You’ve gotta calm down,” Bonnie said, though Wren was pretty sure that Bonnie’s teeth were gritted too.

 

Wren tried to fidget, but her sharp, stylish dress was not designed for fit or function; it was designed to look, and, if Bonnie’s eyes practically falling out of her head was any indication, it was working.

 

Wren paced back and forth in the cabin, her bare feet the only part of her extremely carefully manufactured appearance that was out of place.  That and the nervous look in her eye.  It’s going to be okay, she kept telling herself.  We’ve done this.  I’ve done this.

 

Once, and she’d thrown up quite a bit afterwards.  She checked the time on her p-comm.

 

“Fuck it,” Wren said, turning and storming back through the ship.  She paused in the galley, to overfill Mr. Cat’s food bowl.  It felt like the least she could do, just in case things went wrong and he was on his own for a little longer than planned.  He’d be fine, though, she told herself.  He was resourceful, and clever, and way too goddamn spiteful to die on a ship like this just because she never came back.  No, he’d escape.  He’d escape and hunt down her ghost.  When he looked at her, and did that crazy thing where cats blink each eye separately, she shivered.

 

“Don’t hunt my soul,” she said, and the look he gave her was unimpressed.

 

“What did you say?” Bonnie asked, from just behind her.

 

Wren made a noise in her throat, and said, “Nevermind.”  Then, as she passed into the hold, she took a few calming breaths, and did the hardest thing she’d ever done in her whole life.  She put on a pair of heels with the intention of wearing them out in public.

 

Most of the aisles, between the racks of supplies running up and down the hold, had recently had flat metal plates welded into place over the diamond-plated decking the ship had come with.  She’d needed a smoother surface to walk on, to practice, with some uneven bits so she could learn to track them in her peripheral vision.  Then she’d spent most of the previous sixteen days walking back and forth, back and forth, to get her gait right, and every time she gave up and went to her bed to cry, weary and sore, Bonnie had given her a foot massage.  The woman had magical fingers.

 

Those heels were finally being paired with the outfit they were destined for, a sweeping navy number that made her pale skin and light blue hair pop.  Whenever she wasn’t practicing walking, Bonnie was practicing styling her hair.  They’d settled on an asymmetrical look, with her hair swept back and somewhat behind her.  She completed the look with a pair of glasses that were twelve seasons out of style, which put them one half season ahead of being retro enough to be back in style again.  A true tastemaker, with the mathematics to back up her theories.

 

Behind her, Bonnie looked every inch the part, a slab of personal security muscle ready to start punching throats the second Wren said, ‘that one.’  She had dyed her hair all black and cut it even shorter than usual.  There wouldn’t be a need for any throats to be punched, hopefully, if the plan worked, and Wren was really, really proud of the plan.

 

She walked up to the airlock, where her wonky, badly functioning security bot was waiting for her, and she laid her hand on its chest.  “Ready, Mr. Robot?”

 

It said, “Twenty one point zero degrees, thirty five percent.”

 

“Perfect,” she said.

 

Did it stand up a little straighter at her praise?  She knew that it sort of listened to her, and could understand at least some of her instructions, but its success rate at executing actual commands was pretty low.

 

“No matter what happens,” she said, “I need you to know that I love you.”

 

“I can’t believe you named it,” Bonnie said, from just behind her.  “That’s just ghoulish.”

 

“It’s gonna work,” she said, aloud, as she shifted her weight from one foot to the other.  “It’s gonna work.  It’s a good plan.”  Wren felt her breath getting short, again, and turned around.  It usually helped to say these things to Bonnie, out loud, like that somehow transformed an empty mantra into some kind of inherent statement of truth, but the redhead was closer than she was expecting.

 

Bonnie was looking about as masculine as possible, under the clean lines of a sharp black suit.  She was moving toward Wren, very slowly.  She reached up and cupped Wren’s cheek, very slowly.  She said, “It’s a good plan,” and kissed Wren.

 

Very slowly.

 

“It’s gonna work,” Wren murmured, as they parted.  Then, more emphatically, “It’s gonna work.”

 

“行得通,” Bonnie repeated, smiling slyly.  It’s gonna work.

 

She was still holding Wren’s cheek, and Wren’s heart was beating like crazy.

 

Wren’s original plan, the one she’d stolen the bot for in the first place, had been to use the thing to infiltrate the headquarters of RK Neuman, the company that had landed the contract to manufacture those security bots.  RK Neuman was part of a collective, a loose confederacy of corporations, that included Jyi Bao and Chandless.  Her plan didn’t go a whole lot deeper than that, as mostly she felt like she was operating within a window of opportunity following the release of a new and potentially vulnerable piece of hardware.  The window was what mattered, and what could be gained from breaking into the headquarters of a corporation they didn’t have any particular beef with was a waypoint to be reached further along the journey.  Break in, improvise, find what can be found, break out.

 

It was a terrible plan made moot by the fact that she couldn’t make the bot do hardly anything.  So, as she always did, she went back to the drawing board, and while having a conversation about it with Bonnie, bouncing ideas back and forth, it hit her like a pneumatic crush press.  What she should have done was so obvious, so painfully obvious, that she should have surrendered to Jyi Bao and saved them the trouble.

 

It was someone different who strode first out of the airlock of the Daedalus, with Bonnie and Mr. Robot in her wake: a shark in human skin.  The dark smoke stain in her glasses obscured her eyes, adding a calculated air of menace to her ground-chewing stride.  The tight fitting dress and suitcase painted such a persona on her that all Wren had to do was not fuck up and, like, smile, and everyone who saw her would come to the right conclusion about the her she wanted them to see.

 

Matching the body language of every executive she’d ever met was easy.  Crowds had a way of parting just in time ahead of Wren.  She moved like a knife through water, straight and purposeful, and the people simply moved out of their way.  Executives were a common sight on stations like that, and it probably happened exactly as often as she thought it would that one would just barrel into a crowd and expect to come out the other side unruffled.  

 

Port Houston was a shared space, with four corporate tenants.  None of them had headquarters there, and the offices were more like embassies, to maintain communication with allies, than they were spaces where work was done.  Work was done, but not where the executives had offices.  

 

They moved through the docks, quickly, and started working their way around the transit ring that encircled the station.  In the center of the station, within the transit ring in roughly equal quadrants, were the offices of the four corporations.  Wren had never been able to understand why big corporations needed so many layers of management, but the glut of humans required had to work somewhere and some of them had been shoved out to this inglorious posting.

 

The place where the real work got done, and in fact the reason Port Houston existed in the first place, was in the very center of the station, in the shared laboratory and design space.  Wren had been there once, many years before, during one of Jyi Bao’s many attempts to recruit her and obtain the design of her scanner, and it was the memory of that one afternoon that she was leaning on very heavily.

 

For the most part, entrance to the lab area happened through each of the interconnected office sections.  The UEA engineers had living quarters in the UEA offices, and so on and so forth, but there was one other, nondescript entrance, and it was here that Wren brought them as she had been brought before.  It was a long, bland hallway, doing everything it could to look like every corporate space ever: impressionist art, uncomfortable couches, potted plants, with indistinct, unremarkable music pumped in through a speaker in the ceiling, all of which terminated in a guarded, but otherwise innocuous, double door.

 

The trick, Wren knew, was to look like she belonged.

 

The guards looked at each other as she approached.  One of them stepped forward, arm outstretched, and said, “Ma’am, I’m sorry, but this is—”

 

Wren cut him off with an upraised hand, tilted her head in supreme frustration, and said, “Do I look lost to you?”

 

“Twenty point three degrees, forty percent.”

 

The guard blinked, and looked back at his partner.  “I’m… uh…”

 

Wren said, “I know where the fuck I am.  I know it’s restricted, but this is a fucking PR nightmare and someone needs to do something about it.”

 

The second guard cleared his throat and stepped forward.  “Ma’am, this isn’t the—”

 

“Do you,” she said, raising her voice and cutting them off, “recognize this?”  Then Wren stepped to the side and gestured behind her, to the security bot.

 

Both guards narrowed their eyes.

 

“The correct answer is yes,” she said.  “I know you recognize it.  This piece of shit was designed here.”

 

“Ma’am, we’re really not—”

 

“Call me ma’am again,” Wren said, voice low and cold.

 

Both men stood up a little straighter, and swallowed.

 

Right on cue, the bot turned around, shifted its gun to a stow position behind the right shoulder, and started toward one of the couches.

 

“You don’t want to know what I paid for this thing.  I paid for security!  I paid for peace of mind!  I paid through the fucking nose, and what did I get?”  She turned, shrill laughter echoing, and pointed.  “I got a fucking feng shui machine!”

 

“Twenty point four degrees, thirty nine percent.”

 

“What is it doing,” one of the guards said, as the bot started dragging the couch from one side of the hallway to the other, while the other one said, “Hey, put that back!”

 

To the first guard, Wren said, “Oh, can’t you tell?  It’s protecting my life by improving the efficiency of the air quality system.”

 

The bot stepped back to judge its work, and then turned to one of the taller plants, which was maybe some kind of potted tree.

 

Wren raised her voice, and said, “I feel much safer now.  Thank you.”

 

“I’m sorry, but—”

 

The guard stopped, wincing, as the bot reached into the plant and snapped the top half of it off at the central stem.  It then waved its hand through the empty space, tossed the dying half of the plant on the floor, and turned to find more ‘improvements’.

 

“I brought this waste of space here to get it fixed.  This isn’t just a bug.  This is something worse, and I am doing you, and Chandless, a favor by avoiding an inter-corporate incident.  We get this piece of shit fixed, nice and quiet, so I can finally fire this nitwit” —she jerked her thumb over her shoulder at Bonnie, who remained impassive— “and I can get back to the job I’m supposed to be doing.”

 

“M… uh… Miss,” the second guard said, “this isn’t a repair facility.  We can’t—”

 

“Do I need to get Addleman down here?  Hmm?”

 

Both guards balked.  

 

“Your boss’s boss’s boss?”

 

She’d heard the name once, in passing, while eavesdropping on two other engineers, and for whatever reason it had stuck in her memory.  Those engineers hadn’t wanted to disappoint Addleman or his timetable, and judging by the way the guards recoiled he had a reputation.  She might have been off on the layers of management between those two peons and Addleman himself, but it didn’t seem to matter.  They looked at each other and winced.

 

She said, “I wouldn’t expect you two to understand how a misbehaving prototype can ruin a carefully crafted marketing strategy, but Addleman does, and Addleman will bury both of you if he finds out you delayed fixing… this!”  She turned, aghast, and shook her head as she watched the bot carry an armchair toward her.  “Seventeen million credits, and it’s moving the furniture.”

 

The guards winced, one more strongly than the other.  “Wait here,” the second one said, and disappeared through the double door.

 

Wren drew herself up, affecting every inch of height she could manage, and, despite being a full head shorter than the guard, he shrank from her gaze.  The leather in the handle of her suitcase creaked when she squeezed it.

 

“Twenty point six degrees, thirty five percent.”

 

“That’s enough,” she shouted.

 

At the end of the hallway, passersby ducked and scurried away.

 

The next minute passed in nerve-wracking silence.  Wren checked the time twice.  It had been a gamble to use Addleman’s name.  She’d never met the man, and really had no idea if he was still based out of Port Houston.  Or if he was even still alive.  The guards’ reactions said that his legacy was intact, which had been a lucky break, but she couldn’t rely on that working with anyone but thick-skulled rank and file.  Behind her, the bot continued to rearrange the accoutrements as it saw fit, and, as near as she could tell, would continue to do so as long as it stayed within thirty meters of her.

 

Muffled voices on the other side of the door, getting louder, made her draw herself up again.  

 

“—not responding,” said a wiry, dark skinned man with a sharp, crisp accent, as he came out into the hallway.  “Doesn’t look like it’s attempting to identify itself.”  He was looking down at something in his hand.

 

Wren’s stomach twisted into a knot, and she had to force herself to focus on keeping her expression neutral.

 

“就是他吗?”  Is that him?

 

Wren realized that her shoulders must have been showing the tension if Bonnie could spot it from behind her, and so, counterintuitively, she tried harder to relax.  

 

Yes, but shut up! “对, 对, shh!”

 

He hadn’t changed.  His hair was a little longer, and the frames of his glasses were a slightly different style, but he still carried himself like the smug little bastard that had challenged her years before.  She couldn’t remember his name —she might not have ever known his name— but it was definitely the same little weasel.  Seeing him again made her proud all over again for shorting out his stupid bot.

 

At the sound of their voices, the engineer looked up at her and narrowed his eyes.  “Who are you?  How did you get this unit?”

 

I don’t think he understood.  “他似乎不明白.”  Then, switching to English, Wren said, “That doesn’t matter.  What matters is that your multi-million credit toy is going to get me killed.  Did you know Chandless and RK Neuman are marketing these as a personal defense unit?”

 

“Get it inside,” he said, irritably.  “Hurry.”

 

“Don’t touch it,“ Wren said, when both guards started to move.  Then, with a roll of her eyes, she added, “Some of its programming still works, and the last person who tried to move it was killed instantly.  It’ll follow me, just… get out of my way.”

 

The engineer squinted at her, in surprise, and said, “It follows you?”

 

“Yes,” she groaned, as she stepped past him.  “That’s what it’s supposed to do, isn’t it?!”

 

“Those fucking idiots,” the engineer grumbled.  “I don’t know how many times I had to tell them.  It’s a synthetic soldier, not a bot.”

 

He put so much disdain for the term into his pronunciation, and Wren smiled privately.

 

“You’re a fool,” she said.  “Yes, a military contract is enticing up front, but the real money is in the private sector.  Selling it to entitled brats and execs who wouldn’t know real danger if it shot them between the eyes is how they’ll make their money.  That’s what you should have designed.”

 

Behind her, the engineer snickered.  She was pretty sure he was laughing at her, but that was fine.  Let him.

 

The lab space was exactly as she remembered.  A big open area in the center, four stories high, with multiple semi-enclosed work spaces branching off from the main atrium.  The spaces had walls, but none of them were entirely closed in.  Some of the other engineers and programmers looked up as they walked through, and from the look of it they were more intrigued with the fact that ‘an exec’ was in their space than anything else.  Under any other circumstance, Wren would much rather have been out in the wings, looking over people’s shoulders and sharing ideas… except she knew that wasn’t how it worked.  She’d only been in the room five minutes her first time before someone was challenging her.  Competing against her.

 

In its own way, it was everything she wanted to get away from.  She wanted cooperation.  She wanted camaraderie.  She didn’t want to backbite and battle for favor.  She could see some of the other designers trying to gauge how influential she might be, from a distance, and it made her sick.

 

“Sixteen point four degrees, twenty one percent.”

 

Almost immediately, an alarm sounded.  It was short, turned off quickly, and then sounded again.

 

“Who is messing with the air system again?” came an exhausted voice from above.

 

“It’s this thing,” Wren said, turning and pointing.  “It’s trying to optimize this fucking freezer, and I’ve gotta say, I’m on the robot’s side.”  It was a little chilly, but that wasn’t a surprise; there was a lot of electrical hardware packed into a small space, and those always ran better in the cold.

 

“It’s not a bot,” the engineer said, angrily.

 

“Whatever,” Wren said, groaning exaggeratedly and rolling her eyes.  “Just make it stop.”

 

He hustled to a platform elevator, and once Bonnie, Wren, and the bot were situated on it with him, they went up to the second floor.  That’s new, Wren thought.  Before, his workspace was on the third floor.

 

“Why can’t I interface with it at all?” he whined.

 

Wren knew he was being rhetorical, but relished the opportunity to say, “Because you have no idea what you’re doing?”  Then, because it was in character and fun, she added, “Because this boondoggle of a lab has never produced what was put into it.”

 

The engineer corralled the unit into place, careful not to touch it, then walked around it slowly with narrowed eyes.  “This isn’t one of RK’s prototypes.  This is one of mine.”

 

Wren gulped.  She hadn’t known that.

 

“Where did you get this?”

 

In a desperate deflection attempt, Wren spat, “What does it matter?  Look at it!  It’s not supposed to be like this, is it?”

 

The engineer scowled at her, and grumbled under his breath as he reached over and grabbed a tool from his mess of a workbench.  Wren couldn’t make out what he was saying, but she was sure it was about her and that it wasn’t nice.  Which she kind of loved.

 

He popped open the backplate, reached over to his desk for a data cable, and then, eyes bulged, cried out, “What the hell is this?!”

 

Wren walked around next to him and peered in.  “From the sound of it, I’m guessing that this is the problem.”

 

“This isn’t my hardware!”

 

Wren licked her lips, and looked back behind him.  The engineer had moved into the big space, the big office, and his terminal probably had the access she needed.  She was close.  It was working.  The plan was working.  She just needed a window.

 

She said, “So, what you’re telling me is, someone stole your hardware, and right now they’re probably out there, somewhere, poring over your work and finding all the little loopholes in it?”

 

“Fuck,” he screeched.  “Maybe!?”

 

She leaned over his shoulder, very close, and whispered, “I don’t give a fuck what they did with it.  Fix it.”

 

“What kind of talentless hack did this?”

 

Wren bristled.  It was a good thing her smoked glasses hid her eyes, because he would have seen the flash of anger in her expression.  To cover, she stood up and backed away, waiting for the rising bile to settle.  “I paid more money for this than you’ll see in a lifetime, so stop asking questions that don’t help and start fixing it!”

 

He put the data cable back on his desk.  It was useless, because she’d removed the port it had come with and swapped it out with another, older, open source port she was more familiar with.  She hated working with proprietary garbage, unless it was her own proprietary garbage.  It occurred to her, as she stood there radiating an intense amount of bureaucratic fury, that she was being kind of a hypocrite, but she brushed that aside.

 

After a bit of rooting around, he produced another data cable, and Wren gulped again. Much harder.  Somehow, she hadn’t anticipated this.  He hooked the cable between his personal display and the data port she’d installed.  Wren turned to look at Bonnie, who’d been shadowing her, and gave a tight shake of her head just as the background of Wren’s custom OS loaded on the engineer’s display.

 

Like any self-respecting DIY code monkey making something she never expected anyone else to see, Wren had named her operating system after herself.  At the time, she’d thought it was hilarious.

 

“Wren?” he said, blinking in confusion before turning toward her with a look of fury.

 

“Rumbled,” Wren said.

 

“I should have known you’d—”

 

Wren held out the briefcase toward Bonnie, and pressed a release on the handle.  Bonnie grabbed it and the main part of the case slid free, with some false fascia falling away to reveal Bonnie’s smart CAR, while Wren drew her pink pistol from within the wrapping of her dress, took aim, and fired.

 

She missed, because Wren wasn’t a very good shot, but she looked super badass doing it, and gave herself a gold star for effort.

 

“Wren?!” the engineer cried, as he dove over his desk.

 

The backspray from her errant non-newtonian fluid projectile misted over her, and some of it got on her tongue.  It tasted horrible.  How had she not known how bad it tasted?  It was non-toxic, but still.

 

Bonnie moved out into the atrium, CAR braced tightly against her shoulder, eyes racing from vantage to vantage.  Wren couldn’t see what she was doing, but the short, cutting bursts she fired rattled Wren’s teeth.  Instead of pursuing the engineer, though, Wren went over to a section of the wall she’d seen out of the corner of her eye and punched an emergency alarm.  Heavy doors slammed shut above and below them, locking them in place.

 

“Well,” she said, “that went about as well as it could have.”

 

“Two dead downstairs,” Bonnie called, over her shoulder.  “One guard, and I think one of these other eggheads.  Had some kind of weapon.  Gonna check upstairs.”

 

Wren gave her a tight nod, and stalked around the desk.  The engineer had crawled back under it, and was kicking and clawing at the floor to try and get away from her.  Wren took off her smoked glasses, hung them in the v neck of her dress, and squatted in front of him casually.  She said, “I can’t believe you remember me.”

 

“Remember you?” he screeched.  “You… But… we…”

 

Wren shook her head.  “We what?  Met that one time?”

 

“Is this about the DBX thing?”  His voice quivered, and he kept staring at her gun.  He probably hadn’t realized it was non-lethal, which was just fine by her.

 

“What thing?”

 

“When I took you down,” he said, brow knitting in anger.  “When I beat you, last time.”

 

“What are you talking about?”

 

His jaw went slack, but his eyes were tight.  “We’re… We’ve been… We’ve got that... rivalry.”

 

“We’re not rivals,” Wren said, laughing.

 

“Yes we are!  We’re fifty-one and twenty-eight in ranked matches.”

 

Wren did math.  “We’ve fought seventy-nine times?”  Then she said, “I’m the fifty-one, right?”  Deep, deep in her memories, ages ago, she remembered a message she’d gotten that had said, ‘Finally got u back’.  “What do you mean, you should have known.  What should you have known?”

 

“That you’d come for me,” he said, as he moved out from under the desk, got to his feet, and backed away slowly.

 

“We talked, once, for five fucking minutes,” Wren said, “and you thought that constituted some kind of… bond?”

 

His eyes flicked up, and then back down again like he’d realized he’d given something away.

 

“What’s up there?”

You are reading story Long Haul at novel35.com

 

“Nothing.”

 

Wren raised the pistol again, this time using both hands to steady her aim like Bonnie had shown her, and he shrank.  “It was me, alright?  I’m the one who’s been reverse engineering your scanner!”

 

“My scanner?” Wren cried.  “You… What did you...”  She could feel the heat on her face.

 

He still shied away from the barrel, but he seemed to be getting more agitated by the second.  “We’ve fought so many times.  How could you have not known it was me?!”

 

“I think we have very different memories of the last time I was here,” she said.

 

“I made it better,” he snarled.

 

Wren didn’t like the way he said it, so she shot him.  The projectile hit him in the chest, below the shoulder but above the lungs, and he spun around as he dropped to the floor.  It was a clean hit, and she was proud of herself, but she was still tasting the backspray and it was not pleasant.

 

“Ahhhh,” he cried, as he rolled around on the floor, clutching his chest.  “You shot me!”

 

Scuffling on the floor behind her.  Wren half turned to find Bonnie approaching, and looking grim.  “You brought down some kind of blast shielding,” she said, “or maybe an airlock.  It’s helping us now, but it’s gonna be a problem later.”  She looked insanely hot with that rifle cradled in her arms, pointed nearly straight down.

 

She nodded.  “For all we know, they put that in to stop these idiots from building some dumb bot that ran rampant through the rest of the station.”

 

“It’s a synthetic soldi—”

 

Wren cut him off by shooting him in the leg, and he mewled.

 

“Oh stop it,” she said.  “It doesn’t hurt that bad.” She knew this because she’d shot herself once out of curiosity, and not at all because it had gone off by accident.

 

While the engineer reached down and tentatively pressed his fingers to the spot on his thigh, Wren sat down at his desk and started combing through data records.  He held up his fingers, coated in the viscous remains of her projectile, and rubbed them together.  “What the hell is this?  What did you shoot me with?”

 

“I don’t know,” Wren said, “but I bet it won’t be long until you start trying to reverse engineer that too!  I mean, my scanner?”

 

“You did the same thing to my—”

 

He cut off in a squeak as Wren leveled her gun at him again, without looking away from the display.  “The difference,” she said, tightly, “is that I…”

 

“You did know that was his bot,” Bonnie said, chuckling.

 

“Shut up,” Wren groaned.  “I didn’t know it was this whole thing!”

 

The engineer tried to get to his feet, and Wren took a metaphorical-but-luxurious bath in the schadenfreude.  It looked like his leg was really hurting.  It would be bruised at best, which she was fine with, but any bruising that successfully discouraged him from continuing to test her patience was worth its weight in tungsten.  Once he was up on his feet, hobbling around, she was tempted to shoot him again, just on principle, but she was struggling to find what she needed.  There would be time for fun later, but for the moment she needed to play into his expectations.

 

“Where are the plans for my scanner?”

 

The engineer barked a laugh, which sounded strained.  “Deleting it won’t do you any good.”

 

“Why not?”  It was easy to fake rage at that.

 

He had an ugly smile as he hobbled toward the desk.  “After I cracked it, and wow, Wren, I have to say that I’m embarrassed for you.  Brute force?  How gauche.”

 

Wren moved her chair back and out of the way, glaring at him as he moved around his digital workspace, and brought up a layered series of three dimensional schematics.  She pushed him out of the way and stared at them, feigning examining them while she figured out where the drawings were located.

 

But definitely also figuring out how he’d made her scanner so much smaller.

 

“You’re too late,” he said, haughtily.

 

Wren had her fingers poised over the display, to start looking for the other plans she wanted, and paused.  “Why are you being so cryptic?”

 

He puffed up, and his smug smirk was nearly intolerable.  “Because,” he said, “I insisted that we share the design with every corporation with a net worth above five hundred billion.  It’s out there.  This is out there.  You’re done.”

 

She turned, eyes flashing, and drew her gun again.

 

“NoNoNoNo—”

 

It was incredibly, incredibly satisfying when she shot him in the other thigh, and he collapsed with a high pitched, whiney scream.  Then, for good measure, she waited until he stopped wobbling around so much and shot him right in the forehead.  His head rocked back, bounced off the floor, and then he was silent.

 

Bonnie said, “唔, 果然不是番茄酱的滋味”  Mm, that does not taste like ketchup.

 

Wren stuck her tongue at her.  She turned back to the display, ready to start phase two of her plan, and paused when Bonnie put a hand on her shoulder.

 

“I’m sorry he copied your thing,” Bonnie said, then recoiled when Wren turned to her and smiled.

 

“No, this is good.  Better, actually.”  Wren backed out of the scanner layout, and found the root file structure where Jyi Bao, a materials processing company, kept its proprietary designs, which included processing, smelting and refining equipment for a variety of advanced metals and polymers.  “I probably should have given Jackson the plans for mine anyway, and now I have no reason not to.  Hell, I’ll give him both!  This one is a bit more space efficient, but you need some more sophisticated hardware to do it.  The beauty of mine was that I used readily available hardware.”

 

Bonnie said, “Computer stuff, computer stuff, computer stuff, “ and sliced her hand through the air over her head.

 

Wren groaned, hooked her p-comm unit into the engineer’s work desk, and used it to establish a secure channel to the Daedalus.  From there, the Daedalus fed the incoming data to a quantum communication system Jackson had unearthed from somewhere, that was probably worth more than all of those designs combined and whose twin was buried somewhere in the bowels of Cheng Shih.

 

The designs were huge.  Massive files.  Each of them taking up multiple exaabytes.  The secure channel to the Daedalus was the limiting factor in the chain, and Wren scratched her chin in thought.  Originally, like, originally originally, her plan had allowed for making some kind of grand final stand.  Butch and Sundance, which definitely made her Sundance because good lord Bonnie was looking good in that suit.

 

Not escaping was no longer an option: for many reasons, not least of which because Bonnie was walking around, arms about to burst through the sleeves, and she was getting really thirsty.  They needed to survive so they could have sex.  It was imperative.

 

Bonnie herself came hustling back into the room, expression grim, and Wren put her game face back on.

 

“I don’t know how much longer those doors are going to hold.  I tied up or incapacitated all the other nerds in this place—”

 

“Hey,” Wren said.

 

“—but,” Bonnie continued, as if the interruption hadn’t happened at all, “I think some of the people on the other side of those doors are starting to get curious.  I get the impression that everyone ran for the hills when you set off that alarm, and now we’re probably just waiting for one chief security officer or another to wake up and get here before they start trying to breach.”

 

“And the doors?” Wren asked.

 

“Fucking monsters.  I know you were improvising, and hitting that alarm was the right call at the time, but I have no fucking idea how we’re getting through them.  In fact, I’m pretty sure we’re not.  As I recall, you kind of suck as a hacker.”

 

Wren stuck her tongue out at her girlfriend, but Bonnie just smirked.

“If I’m reading the alarm panel right, Rajeesh here is the senior designer on site, and he’s the only one who can disable the alarm from the inside.  With him out cold, it’s just a matter of which of the four opens their door first.”

 

“Mmmhmm,” Wren said, thoughtfully.

 

“Jyi Bao does raw materials.  Chandless, we know.  Heavy construction.  DynawaveSLR does a lot of military contracts, weapons, powered armor, and the like.  They’re the nightmare scenario, but also, probably the ones that’ll open up first.  I bet the others will wait for Dynawave.  Everything I’ve found says UEA does biotech, but I’ll be shocked if that doesn’t mean viruses and shit like that.  Looks like the whole fourth floor is theirs, and they’re probably the reason it’s so damn cold in here.”

 

Bonnie continued, babbling about DynawaveSLR, but Wren stopped listening.  Her brain was going in two directions.  To the first, she went back to the still-unconscious engineer’s desktop.  “UEA, UEA,” she mumbled.

 

“Are you even listening to me?” Bonnie asked.

 

“Yes,” she lied.  Then she made a triumphant sound as she found some of UEA’s designs, and added one to the queue for herself.  Once that was setup, she walked around to the other side of the desk and unplugged her security bot.  

 

As soon as it was independent again, it resumed its litany of, “Sixteen point four degrees, twenty one percent.”

 

Wren stepped in front of it, put her hands on its shoulders, and squared it with her.  “Mr. Robot,” she said, speaking clearly, “I need you to fix the temperature.  It’s too cold.”

 

Did it adjust itself to more directly face her?  “Sixteen point four degrees,” it said.

 

Wren whooped for joy.  It had never not announced both the temperature and humidity before.  It was clearly doing something.  She ran to the railing, at the central area that overlooked the first floor, and pointed.  “There,” she said, gesturing toward the door they’d come in through.  “That door.  If you open that door, you can get some warmer air flow in here.”

 

The bot moved toward her.  It didn’t turn to follow her finger; it didn’t need to.  Its internal scanning suite was capable of scanning in any direction, in multiple directions, simultaneously, without physically turning its frame around.  For a few seconds, it seemed like nothing was happening.

 

Then it said, “Sixteen point four degrees.”  Had it modulated its pitch downward, to sound more serious?  Could it do that?

 

Wren watched anxiously as it navigated the stairs down to the first floor —she hadn’t taught it to interface with anything so complicated as an elevator— and didn’t realize she was holding her breath until it made it to the bottom.

 

Above them there was a knocking, or a thumping, and both Bonnie and Wren hurried down the stairs.  An intercom squawked, but it was local to whatever door someone was trying to open.

 

The doors that had come down were flush with the inside wall of the lab, and had come down along a track.  It looked heavy, probably well over five or six tons as it was wide enough to cover the double door.  Most importantly, it had the interlocking almost-circles indicating that it was designed for a biohazard problem.

 

Bonnie had seen the same thing, pointing and saying, “That’s good.  It’s hermetic, but probably not designed to stand up to, say, a vacuum leak.”

 

Wren thought for a minute.  “There’s probably other doors that do that then, doors built into the wall that’ll be harder to breach, so when this thing opens we’re gonna have to get out.  Quick.”

 

Bonnie nodded, and they both turned and watched the bot run its fingers along the seams at the side of the wall.  It happened with frightening speed.  Once it found purchase, the bot planted one hand on the wall for leverage and pulled.  Bonnie’s eyes opened wide, and Wren was proud of herself for having the presence of mind to push Bonnie to the side, out of the way of the door.

 

“Did you know it was that strong?” Bonnie asked, as the door’s metal track made an awful sound at being bent.

 

Wren said, “I mean, I knew it had a scary amount of power, but I figured that was so it could operate autonomously for, like, years.  I didn’t mess with the servos or motors.  I don’t know anything about that stuff!”

 

Eventually it bent the track free, and the bot grabbed the door itself and wrenched it sideways.  Once there was a person’s worth of clearance to get out, it stopped and turned around, saying, “Sixteen point six degrees, twenty two percent.”

 

A single shot rang out.  It was loud, but Wren barely heard it.  She couldn’t take her eyes off the sideways trajectory of her bot as it flew.  It bounced, twice, and skidded to a stop.

 

“I think I got it,” came a voice from out in the hall.

 

Wren started to move toward her bot, but Bonnie stuck a hand out in front of her, and stepped up beside the damaged door frame.

 

“Yeah,” the voice said.  Wren thought it was one of the guards from earlier.  “It was that bot.  I figured better safe than sorry…  ...So far, no sign of them.”

 

Bonnie peeked around the edge, just for a moment, and then stuck her CAR around the corner.  It went off in short bursts, more than Wren could count, as Bonnie wiggled her arm to and fro.  

 

“Are you just shooting blind?!” Wren screeched.

 

Bonnie frowned at her and tapped her glasses, and that was enough to make it click in Wren’s mind that it was not just a regular rifle.  It was smart.

 

Once Bonnie peeked out around the corner again, and said, “Clear,” Wren kicked off her heels and scrambled to where her bot was struggling to get up.

 

“What are you doing?” Bonnie hissed.

 

Wren, mind racing, said, “Some of the hardware could be traced to Jackson.  Don’t want to leave that behind.”  She put one of its arms around her shoulder and tried to stand, and remembered at that moment exactly how heavy the fucking thing was.  Fortunately, it was trying to get up too, and between the two of them they were hobbling out the door a few seconds later.

 

Bonnie sprinted to the end of the hallway, head swiveling back and forth to watch in both directions.  They needed to cover about two hundred meters and change to get back to the Daedalus, which would take them approximately an hour at their current pace, and Wren was not looking forward to the inevitable advice from Bonnie to leave her bot behind.

 

Wren liked to think of herself as practical, and that shared characteristic was one of the reasons she and Bonnie communicated so well.  They could cut to the heart of things when they wanted to, and for the most part that had always gone well.  She didn’t think she could take it if Bonnie said to leave it behind.

 

But then Bonnie looked back at them, at Wren gasping and struggling to help her bot move, sighed explosively, reloaded her gun, and ran back to prop up its other side.

 

“Twenty point three degrees, thirty eight percent.”

 

“Oh shut up,” Bonnie growled, and then they were moving faster.

 

Out in the main concourse, most of the normal foot traffic had thinned.  Where before there was a throng was now a scattered few.  It seemed like most everyone in the area had run away at the initial gunfire, and in the quiet afterwards a brave few were venturing out again.

 

The next few minutes were a heart-pounding blur for Wren, who had never been in a real gunfight before.  People were running everywhere.  She shot three people, at least two of whom were maybe trying to stop her, but it was almost as much blind luck as any amount of skill.  Wren had always secretly thought that all her time spent playing DBX would prepare her for the day she got into actual combat, but she was wrong.  Her heart was beating so hard that it was difficult to make out anything else.  She heard a lot of things, but it all blended together into a hellish soundscape.  It was easy to see that the difference between DBX and a real life shootout was that one of them had consequences, but telling herself that did nothing to calm her down in the slightest.

 

Bonnie shot a lot of people.  Wren quickly lost count, but the cutting tool-sound that the CAR made was the only thing that really cut through the haze.  Every time Bonnie opened fire, it made her nerves light up.

 

Somehow they made it across the transit ring, but even shell shocked like she knew she was, Wren knew there were more of them at the edges of her peripheral vision.  They hadn’t been prepared to stop anything going out the door she’d picked, but it hadn’t taken long to get security around to try to stop them.  Or had it?

 

The Daedalus was parked at the end of a wing of docks that were helpfully crowded with structural beams and amenities for visitors that provided cover for them to hobble through.  Bonnie’s uncanny aim seemed to have given the pursuing forces some pause, because they mostly just kept their distance and took potshots.  For her part, Wren did basically the same thing, squeezing off a few rounds every time she was turned enough to be able to aim in the right general direction.

 

Even through all that, Wren was pretty sure that station security weren’t in a hurry for some other reason, so she did her best to get her brain back on track.  Her, Bonnie, and Mr. Robot were making terrible time.  They should have been run down easily.  They should have been caught.  She put her gun away, put her head down, and thought.  They were letting them get away, because…

 

“We’re not getting away,” Wren mumbled, as they stumbled through the portal that led directly to the Daedalus’ airlock, and her heart rate skyrocketed.  “They’re not afraid that we’ll escape, or-or-or they know we can’t.  Oh fuck.  What did I miss?  What did I miss?”

 

“Stop it,” Bonnie said, hissed.  “You can’t do that.  Stay focused!”

 

“The maglock?  The PA?  Do they think they can…”

 

Wren turned in horror and looked at the door behind them.  The airlock door for the port.  “We can’t secure those doors.  If they open them, the Daedalus won’t disengage.  I couldn’t override that if I tried.  None of the engines will engage.  Then they just need to wait us out.  Fuck, how did I not think of that?!”

“Fine,” Bonnie grunted, “It’s a setback, but we’ll just—”

 

As they were slinking sideways through the Daedalus’ airlock, the bot suddenly pushed Wren down and threw Bonnie on top of her.  One of its legs was malfunctioning, but its arms were apparently working just fine.  It said, as it staggered away from them, “Twenty one point two degrees.  Thirty five percent.  Less than three.”

 

Wren started to get up but the bot shut the airlock from the outside.  She darted for the airlock controls, but Bonnie stopped her, grabbing her and pulling her away.

 

“No!” Wren screamed, as she kicked at the air.  “We can get him back!  I can fix this!”

 

She could just make out, through the viewport in the airlock door, the bot hurling itself back down the hallway, and then there was a terrible sound: a deafening burst of sixty hertz hum echoing around in a metal tube.  It rocked the Daedalus, and both her and Bonnie ended up on the ground.  Once again, Wren got to her feet faster.

 

It was hard to be sure, but it looked like it had detonated its power core against the airlock door on the other side of the hall, putting a terrific warp to it.  It wasn’t going to be opening any time soon.

 

“Nooo!” Wren screamed, again, impotently.  “Fuck!  No!

 

Bonnie picked her up, bodily, and hurtled through the ship, with Wren trying to claw her way free the whole time.  She shoved, pushed, and cajoled Wren up the ladder, with Wren looking back over her shoulder the whole time, and she had to chase Wren down when Wren tried to dart along the catwalk back toward the airlock.

 

“There’s nothing left,” she said, through gritted teeth, as she pushed Wren through the galley.  “You’re risking everything for nothing!  Save what you can!  快走!”  Run for it!

 

This, finally, pinged in Wren’s head, and all her mindless flailing to get back to the airlock redirected into mindlessly flailing to get the Daedalus detached from the maglock system and on its way.  Her fingers 

moved like they knew what to do, without any conscious thought driving them.  She knew her ship.  She knew how to make it dance, and it would need to.  She checked her watch, and they were three minutes behind schedule.

 

The Daedalus pried itself free by sheer force, overwhelming the maglock system and only damaging her own docking apparatus minimally, and started moving along the pre-planned exit vector.  She could see that, between her and the Minimum Safe Distance Jump Point, a small array of station security craft had started to assemble, but this part of the escape she had accounted for and that wasn’t where she was going.

 

“Don’t answer that,” Bonnie said, which made Wren blink.  She hadn’t even realized they had an incoming hail, which she, of course, answered.

 

That engineer, whose name Wren had already forgotten again, appeared on her display, with a big knot in his forehead and one eye starting to swell shut.  “You’re not getting away,” he hissed.  “Just thought you deserved to know, before the end, that it was me that brought you down.”

 

“Mmmhmmm,” Wren said, as she tried to stay focused.

 

“I minimized your design so much that I realized... I could put it in a drone!  You thought you were so special, but I replaced you with a tiny, stupid machine that can’t think for itself.  Welcome to obsolescence, you smug bitch.”

 

“You must be so proud of yourself,” she replied.

 

“You don’t get it, do you?” he laughed.  “Those drones?  They’re tailing you even now.  You won’t get away.  No matter where you go, they’ll be so close behind you that they’ll be able to follow you through t-space.  And then it’s over.”

 

That wrinkled Wren’s brow.  She brought up her scanner, and her eyes widened when she saw a pack of very small pursuers gaining on her, as opposed to the rest of the security craft that had been originally heading for the Minimum Safe Distance Jump Point and was now on an intercept course with her new heading.  Tracking through t-space was fantasy, but following someone was theoretically possible if one stayed close enough and had, like, absurdly precise reactions… like a drone.

 

“Your drones can shift into t-space?” she said, narrowing her eyes.

 

“Miniaturization,” he said, smugly.  “Something you never put a lot of stock in, I see, and now it’s going to be the death of you.  For real, this time.  I don’t know where you think you’re going, but...”  The engineer’s face contorted as he looked at something just to the side of the vid call.  “There’s a what?”

 

Wren was pretty sure she knew what what was.

 

A month beforehand, the Daedalus and ninety nine volunteers Jackson had scrounged up launched a volley of asteroids on a near trajectory past Port Houston.  Then, two weeks later, they’d slipped in behind the last of the trail and done the same thing again.  All the ships had taken slightly different positions, like a wide net, flying at slightly different speeds and angling their payloads in slightly different directions, all extremely carefully calculated, creating what she referred to as a temporary asteroid corridor.

 

It occurred to Wren, as the incoming asteroids started appearing on her scanner, that for that engineer to know that his scanner was smaller than hers, or that she had gone for parallel processing where he had streamlined and miniaturized, probably meant that someone had taken pictures of her scanner.  Someone had gotten inside the Daedalus, her home, her sanctum, and spied on her work.  

 

She had, perhaps, never been more incensed in her life.  She suspected that Owens, her foodstuffs guy, was the most likely suspect, but that hardly mattered.  She pushed the throttle wide open, throwing Bonnie back two steps and driving her back into her pilot’s chair, as the Daedalus rocketed toward near-certain death, and it was with a manic grin that she said, “Catch me if you can.”

 

The engineer grimaced and cut the call.

 

“You need to get into a suit, Wren!” Bonnie shouted, just barely audible above the roaring engines.

 

The first row of the asteroids made her stomach sink with the speed of their approach.  They went from three hundred kilometers, to twenty kilometers, to behind her almost as fast as she could blink, and the Daedalus’ autopilot system started pivoting through the field like a fleet-footed fairy.  The asteroids they’d fired hadn’t had much time to bounce around off of each other and turn into a really crazy debris field, but there were more than enough cracked and broken hunks of rock that even Wren, a seasoned asteroid field pilot, was white-knuckling it in her chair.  

 

“Wren!” Bonnie cried, grabbing her shoulder.  “A suit!”  She’d already gotten into hers.

 

Wren turned to argue with her, that no amount of exosuit was going to save them from a head-on collision with an asteroid, but stopped when she saw the look on Bonnie’s face.  This was all Bonnie could do, and she knew it.  The extent of her ability to save Wren was to shove an armored vacsuit in Wren’s face and badger her until Wren put it on.  Her stubbornness in the face of futility was so incredible, and so incredibly charming, that Wren couldn’t help but give in.

 

Which was difficult, given the ridiculous amount of thrust and shifting inertia the Daedalus was inflicting on them as it rolled and spun and weaved and banked, but Wren did it.

 

The field of dots behind them, giving chase, winked out one by one until there were only three dots still following her.  She theorized that even if they had been designed to give chase through a field like this, they probably weren’t prepared to maneuver around each other, and made a mental note to amend some of her future designs for that kind of contingency.  Her drones certainly had some awareness of each other, but they didn’t take their actions as a collective into account on this scale.  

 

Ultimately, though, it didn’t matter what was taking out the other drones.  They weren’t evil drones, as they had no capacity for choice.  They weren’t corporate drones, as they had no control over which side of the conflict they were on.  Wren had a whole internal conversation about what to call them, as they raced through the rocks, and ultimately what mattered was that they weren’t hers.  They were other.

 

Another hail from Port Houston.  This time, Bonnie reached over and denied it.  Wren had probably been about to do the same, but she appreciated Bonnie saving her from herself.  Nothing good would have come from bantering with that engineer except dividing her attention, which she needed all of and he, from the relative safety of the center of Port Houston, could spare much.

 

Two dots following them.

 

Her scanner told her that some craft were stalking her in parallel, running along the outside of the temporary asteroid corridor and keeping pace with her, but that was fine.  Calculating the trajectory of a ship shifting into t-space was a tricky, highly specific thing, and couldn’t be reliably done with so many celestial bodies whizzing around.  She was taking the Daedalus on a diagonal path through the corridor, so that when she emerged on the far side, near the far end, (hopefully) nothing would be close enough to spot her exact exit vector.

 

One dot following them.  One measly pursuer.  Wren smiled.

 

The last twenty asteroids to be fired had been done from further back behind the tailing end of the column, and fired with greater speed so that they definitely impacted with something else.  The others, earlier, were only likely to impact with each other, but the back end was going to be a nightmarish flurry of rocks, each as large as the Daedalus itself.  As she swerved around one of the last of the really big ones, she cut their speed by a third, to allow for maximum maneuverability, and the really crazy maneuvering started.

 

The last dot did not last long in the squall.

 

As soon as it disappeared from her scanner, Wren steered the Daedalus through some navigation choices that took it away from Port Houston and out the far side of the temporary asteroid corridor, and from there, it was only seconds until they shifted into t-space.

 

***

 

Wren had always thought of herself as the kind of person who dealt with life-threatening stress with vigor and energy, and her first few brushes with it had each elicited the kind of bursting ‘I’m alive!’ reaction that quickly led to sex.  Survival is such a fragile thing that, at times, it’s easy to see it in completely black and white terms; that there are only ‘I made it’ and ‘I didn’t’.  It often takes having to go through it to see the subtle perspective shift required between ‘I made it’ and ‘We made it’, and then how easy it can be to go from ‘We made it’ to ‘we didn’t all make it’.

 

Wren spent the next day in her bunk, most of it wrapped in Bonnie’s arms.  Bonnie was able to get up and move around a bit more than she could, and made them food.  She had always compartmentalized better than Wren did, and Wren appreciated that aspect of her personality a bit more than she had previously.  She was so strong.  Wren, though, was nearly catatonic.  She couldn’t get out of her head.  She couldn’t stop obsessing over the things that went wrong.  The things she could have done differently.  

 

It was an absolute mindtrap, made worse by the fact that Wren could imagine hundreds upon hundreds of things she could have done differently.  Alternate paths branching off of alternate paths.  There was no end to it.  Eventually, Bonnie made her get up, to shower and eat and stretch, which she did, but as soon as she was by herself she went down to her workspace and threw herself at an even less helpful problem.

 

It took her five minutes to realize, because she had to write it down rather than just process the sound of it, that ‘less than three’ meant ‘<3’, and that started her crying all over again.

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