Chapter Fifteen

As the injured android hit the ground, his clothing program rippled, revealing the original outfit of IRM-1000 and relieving my stress about a thousand-fold all the way down to my soul. I exhaled a violently shaky sigh replete with that relief as the still-standing Lucas – the real Lucas – turned a surprised expression on us.

“But captain – how did you….” He looked from Jack to his opponent, whose bloodied exterior had settled once more into the solid, tall, terrifying, and hopefully dead form of Zero. He looked like he was sleeping, but for the gaping holes in his chest.

“It was Sam,” said Jack, who then spun around and took me gently by my uninjured arm. “She’s the genius here, remember? Now come on! We gotta hightail it the hell out of here!”

Daniel was on my other side in a heartbeat, pushing Jack back with an insistent arm. “Carrying her will be faster,” he said firmly.

All at once, Lucas and Lex both stepped forward and together said, “I’ll carry her.” Lex probably didn’t want their leader’s hands tied during a desperate operation, and Lucas… probably didn’t want their leader’s hands on me. At least, that was the way I was interpreting his expression just then. It was as rare to see him display as had been the violence he’d displayed with me earlier. But there it was. He looked patently jealous, and his EED was still red.

Daniel had already bent to lift me though. He picked me up easily and held me against his chest as he turned to face the duo. “I’ve got her.” He addressed Lex. “Lex, we’ll need your strength for any obstacles on the way out.” He addressed Lucas. “And Luke, you’ve been here longer than any other android. You have inside knowledge we’ll no doubt need as we go.”

The two rebels looked at each other, then looked at me. Lex nodded his acquiescence. What Daniel said made sense.

But Luke’s jaw twitched. Then his fingers did too where they rested down at his sides. I glanced up at Daniel to see if he noticed, but if he did, he said nothing. I looked back to Luke in time to see some of the intensity in his countenance slipping away as he watched me, leaving him with an air that looked truly pained. I saw his gaze slip down to my arm. He blinked and his brow furrowed. I knew he was sorry. I also knew he wanted to tell me as much.

His storm gray eyes flashed with lightning, and though he breathed slowly through his nose, I knew it was an affectation. He didn’t need to breathe at all. He was doing it out of habit, to calm himself down. So despite the immense pain that erupted in the right side of my body when Daniel lifted me into his arms, I smiled at Luke. Clearly the accident had been just that – an accident.

His eyes widened almost imperceptibly, and his EED slipped from red to yellow. I took it as a good sign and closed my eyes.

The pain was spreading for some reason. Now I was not only feeling it in my arm and shoulder, but in my ribs and even the right side of my abdomen. I bit my lip until I felt the flesh give and tasted blood, but I still couldn’t keep down the sound that crawled out of my throat, a low and miserable moan befitting of the dizzy spell the agony caused.

I felt instantly guilty about it. I knew Daniel had lifted me as gently as he possibly could. But I was also downright nauseated by the pain now, and I didn’t hesitate to rest my head against Daniel’s shoulder.

“Sam, I’m so sorry,” he told me gently as he turned to head back down the hall. “We’ll be home soon.” I heard the footsteps of the others join us and I opened my eyes. Lucas was right behind Daniel, his eyes on me. Specifically, they were on my lip.

I touched it with my tongue, remembering I’d bitten through the skin. He’d probably seen the blood. The concern in his bright gray eyes and on his beautiful face intensified again. I started to say, “I’m okay,” when something behind him caught my attention.

Zero was still lying motionless where he’d fallen. But I noticed that the EED at his eye was still brightly lit. That sometimes happened with fallen androids. Their “minds” remained active for a few seconds, until the last of their thorium left their brains, or “processors.” Once the last of their processing fuel was drained, the life within them would for all intents and purposes cease to exist. Then the light would finally go out.

Zero’s was burning brightly for longer than usual. What was strange to me however, was not the light of the EED itself, but its color. Rather than the oddly peaceful blue EED that most fallen androids automatically reverted to, Zero was shifting from purple to lavender, and finally white, pulsing like the beat of a heart.

Even if I’d known what it meant, I had no time to stress over it. We rounded the corner hastily, Daniel’s grip on me firm, our pace sped along by mounting worry about back-up. An explosion shook the foundations of Zero’s home, and I felt Daniel stiffen against me. But he didn’t slow down.

To our right, Lex’s EED flashed. He touched it briefly, the way the Prometheus members did when they were communicating with each other. I’d come to reason that it helped them focus on the incoming message as if the contact strengthened the connection. But for all I knew, it could have just been habit.

“Shawn’s been hit,” he reported. “They’ve incoming fire on both sides now, and he doesn’t know if it’s safe for us to go topside.”

“Where are they exactly?” I asked. Another wave of pain went through my right side, increasing my nausea, but I swallowed hard and forced myself to focus.

“We commandeered Zero’s chopper,” said Daniel, “He modified it so that it requires thorium to run like we do.”

That’s right, I realized. He’d shown me the fuel gauge, which was old school in a new model helicopter. The chopper by all rights should have been electric. Clearly it wasn’t. Most likely he’d made the modification to maintain better control over the chopper’s activities. I wondered if he did that to all of his vehicles. It would be smart, in a way. It not only provided more firm control, it would keep the vehicles free from registration tracking on the electric highways. It was just expensive. Which was not a concern for Zero.

“Shawn was refueling it when we split up to find you and Lucas,” Daniel continued. “Sonia and Matt are with him.”

In the distance, the gunfire intensified, and I envisioned the scene in my head: Nicholas behind the controls of the helicopter, probably ducking down and swearing furiously as he tried to keep from getting hit. Sonia in the back seat laying down cover fire with some massive gun – or knowing her, just throwing grenades, which would explain the explosion we’d heard – and Shawn and Matt standing outside the vehicle taking shots as best they could while attempting to protect the helicopter from getting hit and disabled. Except that in my vision, Shawn was now prone in the snow, surrounded by stains of green.

Depending on how much back-up Zero had managed to call… we might not stand a chance trying to escape that way.

“This isn’t going to work on its own,” I said. “We need a Plan B.”

“I’m all ears,” said Daniel. His jaw was tight and his blue-green eyes were worried.

“Your ears aren’t that big, Daniel,” I teased him gently. He blinked and looked down at me. I smiled – because sometimes what the worst situation called for more than anything else was a little bit of humor – and after a moment of surprise, Daniel smiled too, shaking his head. Then I said, “We can get out through the secret passage in the cell they kept Lucas in.” I nodded back toward the hall we’d just left. “Then we can circle around and surprise Zero’s men.”

Daniel stopped in his tracks and looked down at me.

Then he looked up again as Lucas said, “It might work.” He nodded down the hall I’d indicated. “I had a feeling IRM-1000 would do exactly what he’d done – place me in a location from which he, Sam, and I could quickly escape the facility if need be. Once Byron’s communications aided me in disabling my bindings, I searched for weak points in the cell’s walls and found them. The tunnel behind them forks, splitting in two. One tunnel leads back into the home through a hidden panel in another wing. I assume the other leads outside.”

“Then it’s possible it would come out behind them,” reasoned Jack.

“Or it might lead us directly into the firefight,” countered Lex.

Both were right. “There’s no way to know until we try,” I said. My voice sounded a little too not strong for my tastes. “And we need to hurry. If you want further ammo for decoys, there are several incendiary devices on the floor in the bathroom of my assigned suite.”

Everyone looked at me. Jack snorted, shaking his head before he glanced up at Lex. “Lex, you’re with me. Daniel, Luke, get Sam to safety. We’ll get the back-up bombs and meet you topside.”

Lucas led the way back toward the hall we’d just left as Jack and Lex split off and crossed the living room toward the hall with my room. We rounded the corner to enter the long, dark hallway and stopped dead in our tracks.

Zero was gone.

“Fffffuck!” Jack swore with enraged vehemence from across the living room. He and Lex were seeing the same thing. A missing Zero. “I fucking knew I should have finished him when I had the chance!”

I could see Daniel and Lucas were processing the plethora of bad possible outcomes now, because the circles on their temples went yellow-orange and spun like mad. But Daniel’s expression became determined. “There’s nothing for it now but to follow through with the plan.”

We continued down the hall, Jack and Lex went about their own way, and this time everyone picked up the pace to a run.

Though I could tell Daniel did his best to lessen the impact for me, the movement nonetheless jarred my body in horrible ways, sending flashes of pain and sickness through me to the point that I felt faint. But I pressed my face into Daniel’s trench coat and closed my eyes, utilizing every ounce of will I had toward the single goal of staying conscious.

My eyes were closed when I heard Lucas say, “Over here,” and both androids hastily crossed what I assumed was Luke’s cell. I was glad for the darkness over my eyes; I didn’t want to see that room again anyway. I heard something slide open, a little more stiff than the other doors in Zero’s home. Then Daniel ducked low over me, tucking me further into his chest before he straightened again.

The opening to the secret passage must have been down low, but now both men were at their full height once more and unfortunately they were also once more running.

Ouch, I thought miserably. Just ouch, ouch, mother fucking OWWW!

Hang in there, Sam.

My eyes opened, I pulled slightly away from Daniel’s chest, and looked up at him. He glanced down, smiling a little.

“You heard me,” I said. “You spoke to me!”

He nodded. “Byron lent me his communication badge. He calls it the ‘co-crest,’ for communications crest. He worked fast,” Daniel made an amused face as his gaze left mine and he concentrated on the route ahead. “And he complained the entire time that you’re the expert in linking DNA sequencing with quantum physical applications,” he paused and laughed softly, “or something like that. But he managed to design just this one.” He turned his head sharply to the right to show me a small crescent-shaped mechanical fixture just below his left ear. It was lit up with pixelated light and blinked softly. “He made it specifically for speaking with you. It’s not perfect, but it’s how we were able to find you when we did.”

The lighting in the escape tunnel grew brighter, and I looked to see that we were approaching an opening ahead. There was a glass partition separating the outside from the tunnel. I knew without even trying the glass that it was bullet-proof, not to mention weather-proof and shatter-proof. I just hoped it wasn’t hack-proof.

Lucas stopped in front of the glass and glanced back at us as we approached. We stopped beside him. “Can you open it?” I asked, but my eyes were scanning the area beyond the glass. I couldn’t see any movement out there, but I could definitely hear gunfire. It was muffled enough that I was hopeful we would indeed come out someplace hidden so we could take the enemy by surprise.

“I can’t, but you probably can,” said Lucas.

I stopped looking outside and turned my attention back to him. He was gesturing to my shirt, which was covered with Vulcan blood.

That’s right, I thought. After I had shot Zero, he’d pressed me up against his chest. The blood transferred from his clothing to mine. “But thorium is universal,” I said. “It’s like if every human being had the same blood type and there were no deviations to it at all. Like unleaded gas for every human car.”

“That’s true going in,” said Lucas. “But remember, the thorium is marked by each android’s individual signature as it passes through their system.”

Ugh, that’s right too, I thought weakly. I knew that. I did. It was like a liquid encoding. The Vulcan blood was marked as if by nanotechnology. Traces of each android’s individual program wound up in their veins, which was sometimes carried along on the thorium as trace element. An individual electronically encoded element.

“I knew that,” I mumbled. I was beginning to feel pretty tired, and my brain was filling with fog. “Sorry.”

“Sam?” Daniel’s voice seemed suddenly serious. Deeply concerned. I looked up at him. He was frowning. “Are you –”

But he was cut off by the sound of approaching footsteps behind us. They were coming at a hard run. I felt panic well up inside me until Daniel turned with me in his arms just enough that we could see Jack and Lex catching up to us.

Jack was grinning proudly. “You really are somethin’ else, Sam,” he said as they met us at the door and Jack pulled jury-rigged bombs out from under his thick winter coat.

I smiled faintly. To be honest, I wasn’t that proud of the devices. With more time, I could have done better. And I was kinda not feeling so into things just then. I felt like having a nap.

But Jack and the others seemed more than impressed, and as my concentration began to drift, I heard them hashing out a plan.

“Sam!”

I blinked and opened my eyes wide. They’d been shut and I hadn’t even realized it.

“Something’s wrong,” Jack said.

I felt a presence beside me that made my skin tingle a little, and Luke’s hand gently cupped my cheek, turning my head toward him. By now I knew his expressions, and this one was him doing his android health scan on me. Normally that would have irritated me a little. But this time I barely cared.

“Her appendix has ruptured,” said Lucas seriously. “Most likely brought on by the impact when IRM-1000 injured her.”

There was a lot of swearing all around, some curses louder than others. But they were drifting away from me. I felt arms moving me as Lucas said, “I need to get her shirt off her.”

I remember wishing, like a schoolgirl, that he had ever said anything even remotely like that at any other time in our relationship.

“Take it and press it to the scanner,” Lucas said.

The pain was fading. Everything was fading.

“And give her to me,” he said.

I felt myself being transferred again, and warm, strong, familiar arms were circling me gently but firmly, hugging me against a chest I knew all too well. “Lucas…” I managed to whisper.

“Shhh,” he whispered back, leaning down to speak into my ear again. “I’ve got you.”

The world went mercifully, painlessly dark.