Except for a whispered voice.
Light, musical.
Use the gift I have given you.
WTF?
Use your mind, Jannigan Beck.
The voice was somehow familiar, but I couldn’t place it.
It was my mind shutting down—the last gasp of consciousness before I—
Push!
Now the voice was urgent, frantic. It sounded like a million voices, all coming from everywhere.
Push with your mind!
I don’t know what I did, but my head was suddenly clear.
And my arms and legs were free of the cuffs.
I still heard a rushing sound in my ears and it cut out all external sounds.
The doctor spun in surprise, his lips moving as he yelled at me. But I couldn’t hear what he was saying.
Rage burned through me. I leapt free of the machine and barreled towards the doctor.
He tried to scramble away, but I unleashed a savage punch, putting all my power behind it.
My fist smashed into Tarsch’s jaw with such an impact that the doctor’s head snapped back like a toy puppet being jerked around by a hyperactive toddler.
For a brief second Tarsch looked at me through his VR goggles with glassy, unfocused eyes. Then he folded down, knocking his head hard on the console as he fell to the floor, twitching.
As I stood over him, blinking, trying to make sense of what had happened, my hearing faded back in. Somewhere an alarm was sounding.
Then it dawned on me. I needed to get out of here. I peeked out of the exam room into the lab. Thank Dynark it was empty. No sign of the soldiers.
My eyes darted around the lab, looking for a weapon. Nothing.
I needed to find someplace safe where I could hunker down and figure out what I could do. I had no illusions of being able to escape from a Mayir carrier, but maybe I could do some damage before they took me out.
Carefully, I climbed the crew ladder up to a landing which led to a sealed pressure door. Behind it was the anteroom where Tarsch had inspected me, and further in was the large medical bay. I knew that there would be Mayir in the bay. What I didn’t know was if there would be someone on the other side of the pressure door.
Before I could even weigh my options, the door whooshed open with a pneumatic hiss and an imposing combat bot strode into the room, weapons clacking as it instantly targeted me.
When a two-and-a-half-meter bipedal combat bot—outfitted with a sleek black exoskeleton, full plating, and assault weapon array—gets in your face, you can be forgiven for losing your balance and tumbling off a ladder.
But as I windmilled my hands and cursed, a robotic arm shot out faster than a cobra strikes and caught me by the front of my jumpsuit.
“Easy, son!”
Holy shit. It was the Sean bot—my own father in the body of an Aanthangan clone bot.
“Dad?”
He eased me back on the landing.
“We can catch up later,” he said. “This way! Quickly!” He turned on his heel and led me through the anteroom and into the circular bay. There, the two Mayir lay sprawled on the ground—either dead or unconscious. I quickly checked them for weapons, but they had been unarmed. I did snag a security fob, which might help us access some areas we might not normally be able to.
“How are you even still alive?” I asked the Sean bot, who was accessing a data port on one of the consoles.
“Long story. Keep watch. We’re going to have company soon.” He pointed towards the empty corridor.
“What are you doing?”
“Finding your ship.”
The Sean bot turned back to the data terminal and I watched him work for a second before turning my attention to the corridor. I still couldn’t believe he was here. A glimmer of hope sparked inside me. But then I remembered what Molda Prundt had told me about my flesh-and-blood father and I crumbled inside.
How was I going to tell him…?
“Let’s move, Jannigan.” The Sean bot strode off down the corridor.
I pushed the dark thoughts from my mind and said, “We need to get up to level 5. That’s where they’re keeping Chiraine, Ana-Zhi, and Narcissa.”
“Who?”
“Narcissa. You’ll like her. She saved our asses more than once.”
“Get down!”
As we rounded the corner, he blasted at a pair of legionnaires who were jogging towards us. Their heavy combat armor bought them a few seconds of extra life, but the Sean bot’s target tracking system coupled with the element of surprise quickly overwhelmed them.
“Here you go, JJ.” The Sean bot tossed me one of the legionnaires’ assault rifles. “Happy late birthday.”
I smiled to myself. Whatever part of that bot was my dad still remembered my birthday.
“You also might want to grab one of those armored suits. But hurry.”
He covered me as I donned the crimson armor. But before I could put on the helmet, the Sean bot snatched it from my hands.
“Hang on a second,” he said.
“What are you doing?”
He extended one robotic finger and slowly drew it along one side of the helmet, scratching off a twenty-centimeter-long section of the paint job.
“What’s that for?” I asked.
“So I know which red hat not to shoot,” he said.
Over the next ten minutes, we wound our way through the maze of empty corridors, luckily without encountering any more Mayir soldiers.
The lift was a different story.
There was a cluster of four legionnaires exiting the lift when we arrived.
“What the hell do you have there, Figg?” one of the soldiers asked me. He obviously had mistaken me for one of the soldiers the Sean bot had taken out near the medical bay.
I tapped my helmet and tilted my head to try to signal that there was something wrong with my comm. It was an old trick, but it worked.
Out of nowhere, the Sean bot started blasting. I joined in, and within ten seconds all the legionnaires were down. I availed myself of a couple of K-45s and a spare battery pack from the fallen
