Android: Rebel (The Identity Trilogy) Read online

  When my feet hit, the transplas shattered into gleaming chunks. I keyed in more slack as I went to one knee on the carpeted floor in the bedroom. I brought the revolver up in both hands and squeezed the trigger as a salvo of shots rang out. Three rounds thudded across my chest, not penetrating the bullet-resistant jacket but bruising me and knocking the wind from my lungs—a physical response that I still found troubling. Another round slammed into the side of my head and my vision turned black for an instant.

  In front of me, Zoran Mlakar cursed and took aim again. “Savin, kill the woman! Kill her now!”

  Concentrating, pulling my double vision back together, I swiveled the revolver toward Savin Mlakar as he swung toward Mara. She had instinctively hunkered down on the bed, trying to make herself smaller.

  I put the laser sight on Savin Mlakar’s exposed throat and squeezed the trigger. That almost broke the part of me that was Drake from the memory. With my programming in place, I could not have harmed a human in any way, much less killed him.

  Simon Blake had no such compunction. The part of me that was him watched in satisfaction as two rounds from the pistol tore through the man’s throat. Dying, choking on his own blood, Savin Mlakar crumpled to the ground.

  “Savin!” Zoran’s howl was filled with pain and anger. He took a step toward his brother, lost for a moment, then turned his attention back to me.

  By that time I had closed on him. I lifted my leg and brought my foot down hard against his right knee. The joint, even though it was reinforced by his armor, exploded and came apart. Broken bone pierced his flesh and the jagged ends stood revealed.

  Forgetting his weapon, blind with pain and the loss of his brother, Zoran opened his mouth to scream again. I shoved the revolver’s barrel into his mouth and pulled the trigger. Grabbing his chest armor in my left hand, I twisted his body and used him as a human shield as Rooma Bansal opened fire on me.

  Her bullets hammered Zoran, thudding into the back of the dead man’s head. I felt the vibrations of the impacts along my arm. Zoran’s eyes stared sightlessly at me, bulging out of their sockets and weeping blood.

  Panzer was stretched out on the floor and I realized I’d never seen him go down. A large, broad-bladed knife stuck out of his chest and blood pooled around the hilt. Ernst Nesterov lay beside Panzer, spraying blood from his lungs with every exhalation. The Russian struggled to rise, but I couldn’t spare him any attention.

  Gasping for breath, focusing on what I had to do, I shifted to the next target. Rooma Bansal was much smaller than Zoran and Savin, and she was fast enough that I felt certain her reflexes had been augmented. I tracked her across the room with a stream of bullets that just missed her and left a pockmarked line in the wall behind her, then I held my fire as she roped an arm around Mara Parker and trapped her as a shield.

  Mara Parker was a beautiful woman. Her hair was dark and long, falling past her shoulders. She had the full-figured body of a woman who turned heads as she passed. Her light hazel eyes widened as she stared at me fearfully. I was certain she believed I was going to shoot her in that instant to save myself.

  At my side, Giselle Portnoy was down, bleeding from the thigh in three places. She had followed Panzer into the room. Since the bullet-resistant fabric had been pierced, I knew at least one of the people in the room was using a flechette gun that fired needle pointed rounds. The flechettes often didn’t penetrate the breastbone for a kill shot to the heart, or the skull for the kill shot to the brain, but they could cut a man to pieces in seconds.

  Judging from the blood that streamed from Giselle, I thought it was possible the inferior lateral genicular artery had been severed. Simon Blake didn’t know the exact medical jargon, but I’d learned them while working homicides with Shelly Nolan.

  It reassured me that I might have been copied from him to a degree and had his memories running through my thoughts, but I was separate from him. I was still my own person. I found that satisfactory.

  But I wasn’t the one standing in that hotel room that day on Mars. Simon was, and he was facing an impossible situation.

  Gunshots crashed in the outer room, followed by grenade detonations. Cracks suddenly covered the common wall, offering testimony to the concussive force of the munitions our two remaining teammates had employed.

  Zoran grew heavier in my grasp and I knew that the brief shield his corpse offered would be gone soon enough. As that thought flashed through my mind, a stream of flechettes ripped through the dead man and dug into my armor with sharp pinpricks. Blood tracked down my chest inside my armor and Simon hoped that none of them had pierced his heart.

  In the corner of the room, Elias Peyton calmly reloaded his flechette pistol as though he had all the time in the world. I knew the movements of slipping a fresh magazine into the weapon took less time than I imagined, that his training would allow him to replenish the pistol in short order.

  “Simon.” Rath’s voice suddenly thundered inside my head. “Take the shot. Do it now.”

  I activated the helmet’s tracking system and saw the bright red reticule blur into being over Rooma Bansal’s exposed left eye.

  Fear widened Mara Parker’s hazel eyes as she gazed at me. Even though she couldn’t see my face, she read my intentions from my body language. She knew I was going to take the shot.

  I released the corpse that I held, trusting that it falling would provide a distraction, knowing that I no longer had a shield to protect me from Peyton’s flechette pistol. I focused on the reticule, holding it over Bansal’s eye, then squeezed the trigger and hoped that Mara would not move.

  Rather, Simon hoped that Mara would not move. I was reliving his memories. I knew Mara hadn’t moved. The bullet sped true, caught Bansal in the eye, and churned through her brain before exiting her skull in a splash of blood against the wall behind her. The dead woman twisted away from her prisoner without firing and toppled toward the floor.

  Elias Peyton hesitated a second, perhaps thinking that Simon or Bansal had killed his hostage, but he didn’t hesitate long. The flechette pistol buzzed as it unleashed razor-edged death that bit into my chest, striking deeply into my left lung.

  I held my pistol steady in my right hand, covering Bansal in case she wasn’t dead, determined not to let her get off a shot. Using my left hand, I flung the small anti-personnel grenade I’d palmed as I’d dropped Zoran. The Taejo grenade disc, no larger than my thumb, flipped through the air and smacked into Peyton’s abdomen. The disc hung there for an instant, long enough to draw Peyton’s full attention. Horrified, obviously familiar with what it was, Peyton reached for the disc.

  With a bleating, ear-piercing whistle, the Taejo grenade detonated and drove meters of monofilament wire into Peyton’s body. Every time the strands of wire hit a bone, they twisted and followed new paths, piercing all organs and tissues in their way. The grenade contained four monofilament strands because four was an unlucky number in Korea. None of his organs would be salvageable.

  Three of the strands emerged from Peyton’s body. Two of them sank into the wall behind him. The third pierced the ceiling, sprouting from the underside of his left jaw. All of them winked crimson-stained silver in the light.

  Weakly, Peyton fought to stand. He slid a foot forward, then leaned over and fell onto his face. He jerked spastically.

  My vision blurred and I knew that I was in trouble. I knew that Simon Blake hadn’t died in this room, but he’d thought he was going to. Panic flooded him when he drew in a ragged breath and discovered that both of his lungs were already filling with blood, pierced by the flechettes. The panic overran my senses and I couldn’t help reacting to it. I wasn’t programmed for the emotion, and it hit my radar as discordant jangling, a sensation of wrongness that triggered my onboard diagnostics.

  I opened my mouth to speak, to let Rath know how badly I’d been hit, but all that came out was a gush of blood and crimson-tinted air that I knew I would never get back. I breathed in and started choking at once because my lun
gs were nearly useless.

  “Simon.” Rath’s voice blasted over the comm in my hood.

  I tried to answer, might have croaked.

  “You’re hit. I know you’re hit. We’re on our way. Get the woman and get out of there.”

  I tried to take a step, but the room whirled around me and my chest felt like someone had parked a cargo hopper on it. I grabbed a tourniquet from my med kit and slapped it high on Giselle’s leg, flicking the servo-driven actuator. The band seized up, cutting off blood flow to Giselle’s leg. I tried to affix a narcoslap to her neck, to get her up and moving and inhibit the pain, but I couldn’t make my fingers work properly.

  Then Bogart was there, a fringe of purple hair showing under the edge of his hood. He cursed as he took in Giselle and me, then he knelt down and patched her, then hauled her to her feet.

  “Simon!” Rath’s voice deepened and grew more commanding. “Do you read me?”

  I tried to answer, couldn’t, so I thumbed the tweaker on my glove to let him know I was there.

  “You hang on! You do not have permission to die! Do you read me?”

  I tweaked again, but I wanted to apologize to him because I knew I wasn’t going to make it. My vision was narrowing to a spot of color and everything around it was greying out.

  Surprisingly, Mara Parker came to my aid. Blood specked her face, offering mute testimony to how close she’d come to getting killed. She stood beside me, pulled my left arm across her shoulders, and shoved me into motion toward the window.

  The sound of the hopper engine sounded far away even though I could see it just on the other side of the window. Hanzo stood in the cargo bay, holding onto the overhead bar with one big hand while he reached for me with the other. Obviously he’d already gotten out of the room so he’d be in the correct position for his next part in the plan. His samurai topknot flew in the slipstream. His hand closed on the front of my shredded vest and he hauled me across to the hopper.

  Hanzo was cursing and looking worried as he laid me in the cargo bay. He wasn’t trained as a corpsman and Simon Blake was long past anything he would have been trained to manage. Simon tried to breathe, tried to speak, but his lungs were full. He was on the verge of passing out.

  I held onto the memory, knowing that I was slowly returning to Khloe’s cargo bay as the ship sped toward Mars. I wanted to see as much of the memory as I could. I needed to know more about Simon Blake’s life. He lay there in the back of the speeding hopper, scared of dying. His fear no longer touched me, but it made holding onto the connection increasingly difficult.

  “Rath, this is Hanzo.” Hanzo loomed over me. Behind him, Mara Parker glanced around and spotted the medkit on the hopper’s wall. Rath made certain we were stocked. Panzer had been the corpsman for our team, and he was dead inside the building we’d just quit. “Simon’s hit. It doesn’t look good.”

  Simon tried to breathe and panic turned his thoughts to pure animal need to survive. I used his eyes and ears to monitor the others in the hopper.

  Mara threw the medkit on the hopper floor and shoved Hanzo out of the way. “Move.”

  Hanzo slid to one side.

  A scalpel glinted in Mara’s fist as she dropped to her knees. She opened Simon’s armor and bared his chest, gazing down at the wounds in his flesh. I watched curiously because that was the sharpest emotion I had been programmed with. I was not sure what she was going to do, and was further confused when she stabbed the scalpel into Simon’s chest.

  “What are you doing?” Hanzo reached for her.

  Mara shrugged out of his grip and pulled plastic tubing from the medkit. Simon’s consciousness hung by a thread, hovering like a bit of flotsam on the thin surface of a dark ocean, and I hung onto it, wanting to learn everything I could. Clues about the scattered past were there and I didn’t want to miss them.

  She removed the scalpel and shoved the tubing into Simon’s chest. Priming a hand suction device on the tubing, she started sucking blood from Simon’s lung. Blood splattered over the hopper’s cargo bay, jetting from the tubing.

  Without ceasing the pumping, Mara leaned over Simon’s face. Her eyes studied his. “Look at me.”

  Simon blinked slowly and tried to focus. I stared through his eyes as well, seeing nothing but her face. The thought that she might be dead skimmed across my mind, but I dismissed it. I would have to have proof of that as well.

  “Stay with me.” She looked fierce and scared and determined all at the same time. “I am not going to let you die. Do you hear me?”

  Simon tried to answer, but failed. Then he couldn’t float on the ocean of darkness anymore and sank. I sank with him.

  * * *

  When I opened my eyes, I was back on Khloe, the cargo ship I had secured passage on when I’d left the Moon, and I felt the alarm klaxons vibrating through the ship’s hull. There was no air in the cargo area to carry the sound.

  Fully alert now, no longer held by the memory, I linked with the ship’s wireless system through the limited internal PAD I had, piggybacking systems diagnostics so Khloe’s near-AI guidance wouldn’t alert to me. I accessed the ship’s sensor array and immediately discovered that we’d attracted the attention of a space jumper.

  Chapter Three

  Attention, this is Khloe, a cargo ship en route to Gullivar colony.” Captain Angstrom spoke calmly, but I detected the tension in his voice because I had filed a baseline on his communications while in stasis in the cargo bay. I eavesdropped through the ship’s comm. “Change course immediately. You are in our logged flight path.”

  There was no response.

  I tapped into Khloe’s external sensors and spotted the elongated shape of the approaching ship. The design was fragile, a connection of cargo compartments much like Khloe, but the other ship wasn’t intended for use in any kind of gravity well. Khloe easily managed the Moon’s gravity, though there were some concerns entering and leaving Mars. She could never have made a landing on Earth without self-destructing.

  The other ship was a package freighter, constructed in space for the sole purpose of ferrying goods back and forth along the space lanes. Her skeletal frame held together in space where the structural integrity wouldn’t be challenged, but she wouldn’t handle any kind of planetfall or moonfall. Earth, Mars, and the Moon all had workhorses that conveyed cargo to and from the surface. Earth used the Beanstalk, the umbilical to space, to lift cargo to the Challenger Planetoid to be shipped by package freighters much like the one closing rapidly on Khloe. The other ship’s skin was dented and had a dulled finish that could have resulted from a lack of a dedicated crew or lack of funds.

  I suspected it was more a cosmetic choice. This ship looked like most of the designs that frequented the Mars to the Moon route and would tend to blend in. Captain Angstrom pinged the other ship’s IFF signature but got only noise back. The ship had been stripped of identifying frequencies and was running dark and silent.

  Most men and women shipping aboard such a craft tended to be gypsies. They’d either chosen to work off the grid because they wanted independence, or they were wanted for crimes and had no other recourse to fend for themselves, no safe harbor. Traveling back and forth on long hauls didn’t attract skilled labor, and law enforcement efforts didn’t reach into deep space unless there was a need. Ship travel was expensive.

  Using the ship’s sensors, I watched as the unknown ship applied enough thrust to pace us two-tenths of a kilometer out. The pilot was excellent at his job, and the flight programs he was using were just as impressive. Aligning two bodies in open space was an exercise in mathematical expertise. I did not know if I could do it even with the programming at my disposal.

  Three rectangular craft detached from the space jumper. Brief flickers of thrusters moved them away from the parent craft and pushed them in our direction. All doubt, which was a prognostic offshoot of curiosity programmed into me, that Khloe was the target was instantly removed. I did not feel anxiety, only more certain that Khloe was the int
ended objective for the mystery craft.

  And that initiated my problem solving capabilities as I searched for a way to keep Khloe’s crew safe without killing the interlopers. Both of those criteria existed simultaneously within me. Neither could be ignored even though they lay seemingly at cross purposes.

  I checked our flight path. We had just cleared Phobos, the nearer and larger of Mars’s two moons. Phobos looked like a huge, pitted rock as it whirled around the planet. The moon’s most obvious physical feature was the Stickney Crater, which most scientists believed had been left by a mass flung off Mars during the planet’s formation. People on Mars watched Phobos set in the east twice a Martian day.

  The moon was only 22.2 kilometers in diameter and its orbit was decaying. Eventually it would fall prey to Mars’s gravity, get destroyed by the Roche limit when its own internal gravity surrendered to that of Mars. At that point, Phobos would be torn apart and be rendered into a planetary ring of rocks similar to those that circled Saturn.

  Tracking the space jumper back, following what I assumed was the original path based on speed and trajectory, I deduced that the craft had been lying in orbit somewhere around Phobos just beyond the reach of the moon’s gravity. Since it had been orbiting the Martian moon, doubtlessly “drafting” the moon’s gravity to keep its speed up without expending fuel till a likely victim was chosen, the ship was nearly at the same speed Khloe was. When Khloe had entered the space jumper’s range, it had begun to give chase.

  The three rectangular craft closed on Khloe.

  “You’ve had your last warning,” Captain Angstrom said. “If you don’t back off now, we will open fire.”

  The threat was idle and I believed the space jumper would know that. Cargo ships weren’t armed for the most part because no one wanted highly fissionable materials in a starport. Even military spacecraft were weaponized with heavy guns in space and not allowed to land. Despite all the sensie output of science fiction stories, combat in space remained in the realm of fantasy. Spacecraft were too vulnerable to attack and too expensive and necessary to replace.