Girl From Above #3: Trapped (5 page)

T
he spider-crawl
of Tarik’s attention skittered over me as soon as we stepped from the pod. He somehow simultaneously existed in the cloud and here, and watched me through both locations.
Dismissing my own diagnostic warnings regarding my general state of disrepair, I scanned the busy dockside but couldn’t see him and had no intention of delving back into the cloud to find him. He was there, but holding back. A warning. He knew where we were.

Starscream’s
overhanging front section loomed high above us. Her hold was closed, but the personnel pressure door would be unlocked. “Get inside.”

Shepperd ignored my words but picked up on my tone and glared into the crowds. “Where is he?”

“Close.” I mentally cut my link to the cloud, severing the permanent connection with nine systems’ worth of knowledge, and turned my back on Lyra. My internal processes were curiously quiet now that I was isolated in my own head.

Following Caleb up the personnel ramp, I noticed his hesitation outside the pressure door. He clamped a hand over the latch and sucked in a deep breath. He straightened his back and lifted his chin, the muddle of emotion he’d worn on his face since the police department vanishing. Then he pushed inside his ship’s hold.

“Oh my, what happened to you two?” James came forward but pulled up short as Shepperd brushed by him.

“Give me a while to get my shit together and I’ll debrief you.”

His brother came through the opposite door and for the smallest of moments, relief brightened Bren’s face. Then in the next step thunder replaced the light in his eyes. “Caleb-Joe, what did you do?”

I pulled
Starscream’s
outer pressure door closed, then locked and sealed it tight. Nothing would be getting inside without industrial cutting gear.

Caleb’s sharp laugh sliced through the empty cargo hold. “Fuck, I haven’t even been tried yet, but you already know I’m guilty.”

I eased forward, my processes feeding me the information that the brothers’ emotional states were quickly disintegrating. James darted his gaze all over me with questions in his eyes. I ignored him.

“Who was she?” Bren asked, adamant disappointment as plain as day on his face.

A muscle fluttered in Caleb’s cheek, and when he spoke, his voice came out flat and controlled. “Jesse …”

Bren’s brown eyes widened. He’d known Jesse. They’d met when I’d helped them escape Ganymede. They’d spent time together after fleet had destroyed the Mimir warehouses. His heartbeat jumped. “When will you realize you can’t go on like this?”

Caleb lifted his chin. “It wasn’t my fault. Bruno—”

Bren exploded. His vitals flared hot and fast, and he moved in on Caleb. He loomed over his younger brother in a way I’d never seen from the commander. “Fran?! The Cande girl!” His right hand flexed into a fist. “Christ, Caleb. Take some responsibility. You killed them!”

Caleb stepped back, just the one step, but the submission didn’t last. He swung a fast and tight right hook, punching Bren square in the jaw. The commander reeled and lunged.

I was between them before either could stop me. I shoved Caleb back and held him there, hand splayed on his chest while he glared through me at his brother. Bren seemed to realize his mistake and backed off, gingerly fingering the flushed mark on his face. He checked me and then James before striding for the external door.

“You cannot leave,” I said.

“Let him,” Caleb grunted.

I ignored the captain. “There’s a synthetic hunting me. If you leave, he’ll use you as leverage. You’re an asset to this crew, Brendan.” I lowered my hand holding Caleb back, ready to tackle Bren if he attempted to leave.

James stood quiet and still off to the side, a hand on his hip. “I er … Let’s everyone just take a timeout. Clearly, we have a lot to catch up on.”

Caleb grumbled something and then left through the personnel door.

James swallowed hard and approached me. “The captain said you collapsed. I’d like to run a diagnostic program and make sure you’re fully functional.” He regarded me with his usual gentle patience. “Will you let me examine your wounds?”

I was damaged but repairs could wait. “Later.” My tone dismissed him.

He nodded and cast a troubled look toward Brendan before leaving the hold. He’d be waiting for me, the way he always did, eager to
maintain
my processes and study my faults.

“Caleb didn’t kill her,” I said, now alone with Brendan. “He’s not lying.”

Brendan’s sigh seemed to carry the weight of the world with it. “I know that. I do. He just … he just doesn’t see how these things come back on him. He needs to grow up and take responsibility. Help him see, synth, because I can’t.” He rubbed his neck, his gaze returning to the exit. If he left, Tarik would find him. Bren’s face was too conspicuous. Fleet had made Brendan a posthumous hero after his freighter had been hijacked by pirates. According to fleet’s official report, the commander had died defending fleet’s honor and their cargo, but his reputation wouldn’t stop the synthetic. Tarik would use him to draw Caleb out, and by proxy, me.

I would stop the commander from opening that door by any means necessary.

The moment he gave up on the idea of leaving, he turned his back on the exit and walked past me, leaving the hold. He was trapped inside
Starscream
, just like the rest of us.

“
I
’ve spent
some time rewriting key segments of code. I’d like to try them.” James’s light touch fluttered over my face, applying a light cream designed to help my synthetic skin replenish. “It could be the breakthrough we need to free your prohibitive protocols.”

“Agreed. But first, I need to speak with the captain.”

James’s soft hazel eyes focused on my eyes instead of where his fingers were working across my skin. A moment dragged between us. He clearly wanted to say something, but as the quiet stretched on, the likelihood of him doing so waned.

“He’s unstable,” James finally whispered, as though suspecting Caleb could hear through
Starscream’s
walls.

“Yes.”
So am I.

The moment stretched thin. The smallest hints of a smile tightened his lips, but there was little humor in it. He’d aged since arriving on
Starscream.
I could tell in the tightness around his eyes and in the thoughtful hesitation before he spoke. He guarded himself, but I wasn’t entirely sure against what.

He’d spent every hour of his time on
Starscream
trying to unravel the mysteries of my programming. When he wasn’t examining my protocols, he was gathering additional equipment to help with his mission to understand me. He had expectations and hid them well, but not well enough. But while he served a purpose, I would allow the lingering touches and soft pauses to continue. His
feelings
for me motivated him to succeed.

“Tarik must have an owner.” James turned away so abruptly that I felt the tension snap and fall away. “He has to be someone’s
life-ever-after
dream.”

Chen Hung controls him now.
I twitched and buried the screaming truth beneath streams of nonsense data.
Each one of Starscream’s panels contains three hundred and ninety-two rivets, and each recreation bay holds over a thousand of them.
Over and over I folded the data, until it silenced the terrible need to tear into my own skin and scratch the truth out of me.

“To find his owner, you will need to search the cloud manually. I wouldn’t recommend it,” I said. “He’s clearly maintaining a connection and could easily follow your search back to
Starscream
. If he gets inside the ship’s systems, I am not entirely sure what damage he could do. Besides, discovering who he was meant to be is redundant.”

James stood rigid at his desk. He had his back to me so I couldn’t see his face, but I heard the tired pull in his words. “Failsafes and protocols are designed to prevent this kind of attack.”

I ran a quick diagnostic of my overall wellbeing and then headed for the door. “Failsafes and protocols can be unlocked, Doctor Lloyd, if you have the key in the code.” I didn’t need to look back to know he’d already be lost in his work.

When he’d joined
Starscream
alongside me, he’d had little choice. On the run from Chitec and various authorities, he couldn’t have stayed with his sister on Janus, but he’d had ample opportunity to leave the crew since then. When I’d questioned him, he’d blamed me, saying he couldn’t leave until I was fully functional, but it was more than that. He’d had other motives for helping me escape Janus, and he had other motives now too. Perhaps the most dangerous motive of all. Unlike Haley, it was unlikely I’d ever experience something as complicated and human as love, but I knew what the aftermath of it looked like. I would use the young doctor’s burgeoning infatuation with me for as long as it was beneficial, just as Caleb Shepperd had done to the girl whose memories haunted my programming.

I arrived on the bridge and found Caleb slouched in his flight chair, boots resting on the flightdash, staring hard through the obs window at the crowded dock outside. He’d changed out of the ruined suit and was back in his familiar black pants and gray sweatshirt. He held a pulser in his right hand, like those the Lyra police used.

He caught the path of my gaze and said, “Dug it out of storage. Pulser like this should fuck with the synth’s processes.”

He doesn’t think at all. He’s just following orders.

Caleb’s hair glistened from the shower he’d taken and his face was cleanly shaven. Had
Starscream
been stocked with alcohol, he’d have been drowning himself in it, but the ship was dry and so was he.

I stood between the two flight chairs and rested my hand on the back of what had once been Fran’s chair.

“He’s out there,” Caleb said. The quivers had vanished and the steel was back in his voice. I wasn’t sure whether being back on
Starscream
gave him strength or if punching his brother had helped, but the man I’d seen vomiting in the hotel bathroom wasn’t the same man seated in the flight chair.

I filtered through the faces in the streams of people flowing along the dock, tagging those I recognized. Without my link to the datacloud, I couldn’t decipher who they were but didn’t need to. Tarik stood out like bad code in a datastream. Standing immobile, he peered up at
Starscream
. With a little magnification, it was clear he was watching Caleb, just as the captain was watching him, his finger hooked over the trigger of the pulser pistol.

“Yes, he is.”

“I thought you said he had to go back to base to fix himself up?”

“He does, but clearly, he’s waiting until the last possible minute.”

“Fucking psycho synthetics.”

I couldn’t disagree, knowing what I did about our progenitor.

Caleb tore his stare away and arched an eyebrow at me. “You gonna stand there all day? You’re making me fucking nervous.”

His heart rate had increased in the few minutes I’d been standing beside him.

I relocated the romance novel from Fran’s flight chair to the dash and settled myself in the well-worn seat.

“Did James fix you up?” A hint of irony underlined his words.

“Yes. Doctor Lloyd is a capable technician.”

“Oh, I’m sure he’s very capable.”

A smirk and a glimmer of humor briefly touched Caleb’s brown eyes before he could skip his gaze away and busy himself with something on the flight controls. “He tends to your every need, huh?”

“Not my every need, no.”

His hand stilled over a panel. “What happened while you were in the datacloud, One Thousand And One?”

“Tarik launched an attack, intending to lock me down while he targeted our exact location.”

“Can he do the same again?”

I focused on the male synthetic. He stood statue-still while the people of Lyra flowed around him. “Yes, if I were to reconnect and if he were within a certain radius. No, I do not know what that radius is. I didn’t know such an attack was possible until he executed it.”

“Could you throw his mojo back at him?”

“Do the same? I …” I faced Caleb, finding him artificially relaxed on the exterior while his heart raced within. “In theory, but without direction, he’d likely discover me first.”

“And there’s no synthetic owner’s manual?” His lips twitched, his smile threatening to break into a grin.

A joke. He wasn’t funny. “Do you come with an owner’s manual, Captain? Because I’d like to study your troubleshooting section.”

“Would you like to strip me down to my nuts and bolts an’ figure out what makes me tick?”

“I knew what made you tick from the moment we first met. That’s why I punched you between the legs.”

He chuckled and contemplated continuing the wordplay, but something stopped him, be it the events of the last twenty-four hours or his changing perception of me. Perhaps the topic of conversation had cut too close to the truth. I already knew he loathed who he was, but either he couldn’t see how to change it or he didn’t care enough to. It didn’t take a synthetic mind to decipher Caleb Shepperd, just a human one.

“Does the past ever leave us?” Caleb asked, his smile fading away.

“It is always there,” I replied softly. “It is who you are.”

He tapped his fingers on the arm of his flight chair. “Not you. You could erase yours?”

We stared out of the obs window, our gazes lost among the crowd. “But then who would I be?”

He blinked and looked at me. “You’d be you.”

T
he silence
in the bridge hadn’t been as awkward as I’d feared. #1001 had sat quietly and machine-still in Fran’s flight chair, and I found myself relaxing in her company. She didn’t judge. Bren, the doctor, they’d have endless fucking questions, and all the while they’d be thinking this was somehow my fault. #1001 didn’t make assumptions; she didn’t jump to conclusions.

She left after a few minutes of mutual silence, abandoning me to my thoughts.

I rubbed my bruised knuckles, set the pistol down, and reached for the paperback book. As I flicked through the pages, that Old Earth smell of aged paper wafted over me. I had a way out of this mess. My only way, given how every fucker wanted a piece of me.

I picked up
Starscream’s
comms unit, tucked it into my ear, and secured an external comms link.

“Graham Creet,” I said, pinging the smuggler’s comms.

I hadn’t seen or spoken to Creet since he’d put a bag over my head on Mimir and frogmarched me back to fleet. I didn’t hold a grudge—not much of one. He’d been protecting his interests. I’d have done the same.

“Ho there, Cap’n Shepperd.” His voice boomed so hard down the link I had to adjust the volume. “You do live an interesting life, kid. I got all manner of folk asking me where your ass can be found. Apparently, there’s a Cande bounty on your head. Say it ain’t so.”

“Creet, you asshole. It ain’t funny.” Though I smiled at the humor in his voice. Creet was about the closest thing to a friend—my only friend—I had.

“My face is straight.”

“Uh huh.” I glanced back at the door to the bridge, checking it was fully closed. “I’m finished with those books you leant me. Interesting plot twist. I can get them back to you, but there are some issues with delivery.”

“Ah, customs on your ass?”

“The Lyra law. Me and
Starscream
are grounded.”

“Lyra?” Creet made a disgusted sound. “Only you, Cale, would go to the most fleet-infested corner of the nine systems with a fucking bounty on your head. Kid, I gotta wonder if your brain cells are swimming in whiskey.”

“If you like that, then you’re gonna love this: I’ve been charged with murder.”

He laughed, because he’s a fucker. “When I see you next, I’ll buy you a beer and you can tell me all about it.”

At least he didn’t automatically assume I was guilty. “So, you’ll help?”

“I’ll put it to the people who make the calls. Your return package is of high priority. But Lyra…? Fuck, Cale.”

“Yeah, yeah …” If there was anyone left in the nine systems who could get
Starscream
through Lyra’s atmo-domelocks, it had to be the Fenrir Nine.

I
’d gathered
the crew in the hold. Doctor Lloyd barely looked at me, preferring to tap and swipe away at his touchpad, no doubt working on some new code to fix the synth. She stood cool and immobile beside him, head tipped to the side while she scrutinized
Starscream’s
dented panels. Anyone else would look relaxed in sweats, but not her. Sweats just made it easier for her to kick your ass six ways to Sunday. She’d rammed the rebar through her synth friend’s chest and had kicked his ass in a pencil skirt for fuck’s sake.

“Okay, this is how it is,” I began, veering my thoughts away from those images before they got me into trouble with her acute observational senses. My gaze hooked on Bren, who stood between the synth and the side door, arms crossed, a glower on his face that might have bothered me had I cared what he thought.

I crossed my arms too. “Yes, I was arrested. I’ve been charged with Jesse’s murder. No, I didn’t do it. Synth, please confirm whether I’m full of shit.”

The doctor looked up with a briefly startled look on his face as though he’d just realized he was supposed to be listening.

“Your words are true, Captain,” #1001 replied, face impassive, eyes on me. Her crisp voice echoed through the empty hold, bouncing off the walls and hammering my fucking point home.

Bren’s jaw worked. An apology would have been the right thing for him to say. When it was clear I wasn’t getting one, I wondered why it bothered me so much. I should’ve known he wouldn’t back me up. He was only here because he couldn’t leave without his post-death, heroic-fleet-commander reputation catching up with him.

“How did you pay for bail?” Doctor Lloyd asked, glancing between me and Bren, probably wondering if we were about to kick off again.

I rubbed my chin. “Bruno paid me a fuck-load of credit to hand the synth over.”

It took a couple of seconds for that to sink into the doctor’s head. His eyes narrowed as soon as his suspicion gripped him. “And you accepted?”

“You’d have taken the deal too if you’d had two guys about to fuck you over. He also threatened to call the Candes in. I have enough shit to dig myself out of.”

“But you aren’t. Going to hand her over, I mean?” He shifted his weight from foot to foot.

I paused, only because I had to tread carefully with the information I could reveal in the presence of the #1001. “No.”

I uncrossed my arms and started to pace a little. They watched my every step: a brother who hated me, a technician who tolerated me, and a synth who—well, I wasn’t sure what she thought of me. She’d hated me too, but then there had been that moment in the pod when she’d squeezed my hand.

“Well?” Bren asked, voice cutting.

My thoughts had wandered toward #1001 again, who was now watching me with that default mildly curious expression of hers. Shit, she could probably read my thoughts in my every move.

I stopped pacing. “Bruno gave me three Lyra days to hand her over. We have two left. He doesn’t know we’re together—on the ship—and that she’s on my crew.”
Whatever, fuck.
I could hear my heart thudding, which meant so could she. Jesus, I might as well be prancing about naked in front of her for all the chance I had of hiding my thoughts from her.

“Captain, you—”

“Don’t.” I stopped pacing—at some point I’d started up again—and pointed a finger at her. “Don’t read me right now. Be less machine and more like …” I’d nearly said Haley. Haley would’ve been the wrong thing to say. Why was I even thinking of her.
Fuck, I need a drink.
“More human. Just be more human and stop giving me updates about my fucking heart rate, okay?” I didn’t wait for her to reply and plowed on. “Bruno’s not the worst of it. There’s a synth out there. He killed Jesse and would have killed me too had One not kicked his ass. He’s probably right outside
Starscream
, using his machine-mojo to crunch the numbers and determine how to get to us. So for the foreseeable future, no one leaves this ship.”

Bren frowned and looked at #1001. The doctor was looking at her too, but she only had eyes for me.

“There’s something else,” she said. “Something you’re not telling us.”

“There is.” I had to be careful. At this moment, the synth was the most dangerous threat to me. If she knew what I had planned … I stopped those thoughts right there. “I have a way off Lyra, but I can’t tell you how, so don’t ask. All we have to do is sit tight for two more days. No leaving the ship. No wandering off to check the newsfeeds. We eat and sleep on
Starscream.
Everyone understand?”

“You’re asking us to trust that you’ll miraculously slip the Lyra police, a drug lord who owns half the Lyra strips, and a male synthetic?”

Of course the question came from my brother. He would be the one to doubt me. Why couldn’t he just trust me? “Walk out the door if you want. That psycho synth will find you and break your neck like he did Jesse’s. This isn’t about options, Bren. We’re stuck here whether we like it or not.”

“Can’t we just take off?” the doctor asked, his voice pitching ever higher as panic crept in. If he freaked out, I’d gladly punch him out—for his own safety.

“We could use
Starscream’s
engines to break free of the docking locks, but we wouldn’t get far. Notice the big fucking domes we’re in? If we punched through those, the toxic air, change in air pressure, and drop in temperature would kill everyone on Lyra in minutes. I’m selfish, but I ain’t that selfish, Doctor. We need clearance to pass through three domelocks, and we can’t do that while harboring my fugitive ass.”

“So, how?”

Maybe I should just punch him anyway. “Didn’t I just say? Don’t ask.”

“Yeah, but … why not? We’re all in this together.”

If I told him about the Nine, he’d never shut up. “I’ve connected with some people who can help. That’s all you need to know. And no I can’t say another fucking word.” Bren and the synth would immediately know the people I’d reached out to, but they wouldn’t know the terms of our rescue. “So”—I clapped my hands together, making James jump, and plastered an overly enthusiastic smile on my face—“there are plenty of maintenance jobs on
Starscream
to keep us occupied. Two days together. Let’s try and keep it civil, shall we?”

I looked at my unwilling cellmates and wondered if the next two days would be the longest ones of my life.

W
ithin hours
, I was ready to break my own rules. I’d tried focusing on some minor repair work inside
Starscream’s
engine hatches—the parts I could get to without going outside—but a pounding headache had loomed out of the dark, and not long after, my hands had started to shake.

Fuck.
Mouth dry and heart racing, I was craving a drink and knew exactly which gun barrel I was staring down: withdrawal. The same as Fran back on Asgard. Aw, shit. I couldn’t think about her. Too much crap in my head meant focusing on even the littlest things ended in disaster. I left the engine hatches and searched all of
Starscream’s
various hiding places for alcohol. I’d cleared them out days ago, but it didn’t hurt to check again. But in the back of my mind, I already knew there was something on
Starscream
that would ease my symptoms: Fran’s supply of
phencyl.

I found myself outside Fran’s old cabin, now the doctor’s. The door was open, so I could see inside. #1001 was lying on the bunk with her eyes open, without seeing. Seated beside her, Lloyd monitored his datapad. From over his shoulder, I could see various streams of information flowing across the wafer-thin display. It might as well have been a foreign language for all the chance I had of reading it.

“It’s okay, Captain,” Lloyd eventually said. “She’s engaged her rest protocols. She’s essentially asleep.”

She sleeps with her eyes open.
I stepped inside and leaned against the wall. “I just came by to grab something of Fran’s.” I knew exactly which panel to remove to find the
phencyl
, but I couldn’t tear my gaze from #1001. “Can she hear us?”

“If she chooses to.” He still hadn’t looked around at me. Whatever data filled his screen was far more interesting than I was.

“She must trust you, huh? To let you go in like that.”

“Into her programming you mean?” He lifted his head and then turned slightly in his seat. “I’d like to say yes, but she’s monitoring everything I do. It’s not so much trust as confidence.”

When he talked about her, he lost his nervousness. When he’d first joined us, everything about
Starscream
had frightened him. Some people aren’t made for travel in the black. The unending vacuum just a few panels away, the isolation, trusting me to fly him straight—it all terrified him, but she didn’t. He talked about her like some people talked about love. But he hadn’t seen her hold a gun to my head or take out a pimp’s thugs in a back alley. He loved the idea of her but had no idea of the reality.

I nodded and he went back to monitoring his screen.

“How’s she doin’?” I asked, running my gaze down the length of her body. The sweats were too big for her lithe frame, too long in the arms and too baggy around her waist. It made her look small and vulnerable. Such a fucking contradiction.

“Okay. Her episodes have stabilized. She’s managing them. And I think I might have a way to break open the protocols keeping her from reporting her findings from Chen Hung’s towers. I’m just testing a new routine now, actually.”

“Y’know, I wanted to ask you something …” I cleared my throat. “She’s not like the others. She’s not programmed to behave like her benefactor. So whatever she does, whatever she says and thinks, that’s all her, right?”

“I suppose we can safely assume as much, given the data we have. But knowing which elements are sentient and which are programming isn’t straightforward. She’s designed, from the code-level up, to imitate humans.”

“Yeah, but … she’s different. So ...” This was where it got awkward. “When she er …” How to describe the handholding incident without the doctor knowing how freaked out I was by it? “When she touches someone, like holding a hand, as an example, hypothetically.”

His shoulders tensed and he asked coolly, “What about it?”

“Is it real? Is it her, her past, or what?”

He twisted sideways in his seat so he could see me and #1001. “She experiences the world in streams of data. A normal synthetic is programmed to respond to external stimulation like a human being does, but One doesn’t work that way. She seeks out data, such as touch, taste, and smell, because she enjoys the resulting influx of code. I suppose we’re the same. When we eat, we’re biologically programmed to assess the substances we ingest to determine whether they are acceptable for consumption. Our taste buds send our brains chemical data, and we respond by eating more or spitting the substance out. One is the same. She’s experiencing the world, learning what she likes and doesn’t like, the same way we learn. At least as far as I can ascertain.”

“So you’re saying it does or doesn’t mean anything?”

“She told me she wants to feel.”

“She told you that?”

He hesitated. “And it’s what I’ve been able to confirm through my own observations.”

“You’ve seen her seek out physical contact?”

“Something like that.” He tapped on his datapad, a flush of red darkening his cheeks.

Holy shit, him and #1001 had been all up close and personal? I laughed, short and sharp. The image of it was absurd. She’d eat him for lunch. “Doc, I didn’t think you had it in you.”