As I brought up my RB, I glanced over at Ana-Zhi. She was cowering against the wall, paralyzed with fear.
“Snap out of it,” I yelled at her. “Shoot!”
The bot had rolled into a kneeling position and was blasting away at the scrubbers. I joined in, and a few moments later so did Ana-Zhi.
“Careful of the crossfire,” I warned.
But before I had finished speaking the words, the battle was over. We had survived. Thanks to the war bot.
It checked the destroyed scrubbers, one by one, to make sure they were all non-functional—which was smart. We didn’t want any nasty surprises.
“JJ, are you okay?” the bot asked, turning to me.
It really was my father’s voice. And no one but him had called me ‘JJ’ since I was a kid.
This was impossible.
“What the hell are you?” Ana-Zhi growled, leveling her RB at the war bot.
“Nice to see you too, Z,” the bot said.
I stepped forward. “Why are you talking with my father’s voice?”
Maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed like the war bot’s shoulders slumped. “I can’t believe you’re here, JJ.”
“Jannigan, move away from it!” Ana-Zhi shouted. She kept her blaster trained on the bot.
“Okay, settle down, you two,” the bot said. “I know this is weird, but it really is me. Sean Beck.”
A million thoughts spun through my brain, but none of them made any sense. I took a deep breath, trying to calm myself. “Explain,” I said in a quiet voice.
“I was betrayed by Virgil Yates during our mission to retrieve the Tabarroh Crystal for the Dodelan Alliance. After I had located the Tabarroh Crystal, Yates sealed me into a hot zone, swarming with security bots. Then he left me there.”
“How did you survive?” I asked.
“Dumb luck, mostly,” the bot said. “I managed to hide in the empty vault where the Tabarroh Crystal had been. I spent three days there, waiting for the bots to disperse.”
“Then what?” Despite how strange this was, I found myself fascinated by the story.
“Then I made it back to my zephyr. Thank Dynark, Yates hadn’t destroyed it or taken it. I was able to shut down the security grid in the zone I was in and buy myself some time.”
I shook my head. “Even if you were able to buy yourself some time, you wouldn’t have been able to buy yourself seven years’ worth of time.”
“Very good, JJ,” the war bot said—in the same condescending tone my father had often used with me. “It became very clear that without food or more specifically water, I wouldn’t last more than four or five days. A week at the outside. It turned out I was able to overload one of the evaporator units in an atmospheric regulator and that managed to produce a little water, so I ended up lasting nine days.”
“What do you mean lasting nine days?”
“I mean, that’s when I put my body into hibernation and cross-loaded my neural array into this Aanthangan clone bot.”
“You what?” I gasped. This was inconceivable.
“Don’t look so surprised, Jannigan. You knew we were looking for one. Remember Denn Jerue?”
I did remember Denn Jerue. He was an old guy in Beck Salvage’s advanced research group. The ARG was in charge of the intake of technology acquired during a Beck Salvage mission. Either overtly or covertly. Jerue’s holy grail was something called an Aanthangan clone bot.
“Denn Jerue believed that the Yueldians had acquired a specimen and stored it here on Bandala,” the bot said. “We kept it secret from the rest of the crew, but my secondary mission was to recover the Aanthangan technology. Even if the Rhya never let us bring back the bot itself, we were going to do an onsite reverse engineering of its technology.”
“What the hell is an Aanthangan clone bot?” Ana-Zhi asked.
“You’re looking at it,” the bot said. “It’s a class-five combat bot, similar to the Jacrea T-311.”
“I still don’t understand.” I didn’t think the bot posed a danger to us, but I was having a hard time making sense of its story.
“The Aanthangans were the first to develop neuro scanning protocols at atomic resolution, nearly eight hundred years ago. This bot has a gamma-ray holographic brain scanner that allows for neuro cross-loading into its bacto-substrate.”
“How about speaking English for a second?” Ana-Zhi asked.
“I transferred a copy of my neural array—thoughts, memories, consciousness—into this bot.”
“What?” It was talking about a technology that didn’t exist.
“It was the only way to survive,” the bot said.
“I don’t believe you,” Ana-Zhi said.
“That’s because you have zero knowledge of Aanthangan technology,” the bot replied. “Ask me a question. Something only Sean Beck would know the answer to.” It turned to me. “You too, JJ. Ask me anything.”
I looked over at Ana-Zhi. She didn’t say anything. I wondered if she was thinking about it. Considering whether or not the bot was telling the truth.
“Okay, Z,” the bot said. “Remember Harcho Moll way back when? You and he had a thing going on for months during the Dadari expedition. Then you caught him with that little Palanese woman… What was her name?”
“Fenine Vaskas, the bitch.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Fenine Vaskas. When you confronted Harcho, he said she was his cousin and there was nothing going on.”
“Cousin, my ass,” Ana-Zhi said. “He didn’t know a soul on Palan, let alone have any family there.”
“So you went down to the commissary and got one of those big containers of catsup.”
“Mayonnaise.”
“Right,” the bot said. “Mayonnaise. And you poured it into the cooling system of his hover-jet.”
Ana-Zhi laughed. “He had to rebuild the engine.”
“And wasn’t it an old Mercer MKX that he got from his brother?”
“Yeah. Moll never forgave me for that. Fuck ’em, though. He had it coming.”
“He sure did.”
I shook my head in surprise. This was unreal. Ana-Zhi was reminiscing with a robot.
“C’mon, JJ,” the bot said. “What about you? Remember when you were a kid and we went to the aqua park on Jaalbar?”
I didn’t reply, but
