“Five you said?” The Sean bot punched at the lift controller touchscreen.
I followed him into the lift and nodded.
As we rode up, he asked about where the women were being held, how many guards, etc. I told him what I remembered, but it was clear that we would have to improvise. As usual.
My dad wasn’t really one for improvisation. Or spontaneity. Or anything that wasn’t planned down to the minute. It used to drive my mom crazy. And me, for that matter.
But he got things done. That was for sure. Hopefully he still had that ability—even in his robot form.
Who was I kidding? Now he was even more formidable.
“Down!” the Sean bot shouted as the lift doors opened. He sprayed blaster fire into the hallway, mowing down a pair of Mayir technicians and a repair bot.
After the smoke cleared I dusted myself off. “Damn. How many is that now? A dozen?”
“Sixteen so far. Not all dead, of course. But none of them will be bothering us.” He stalked down the hallway.
I ran to keep up with him. “Nice. Only five hundred more to go.”
“Actually, the Baeder has a crew of approximately eleven hundred. At least, according to the logs.”
Yeah, those odds might be a little overwhelming, even for an Aanthangan clone bot.
I recognized the way from here, so was able to guide us to the cell block where the women were held. It wasn’t guarded, but it was locked. The security fob at my waist took care of that.
“Holy shit!” Ana-Zhi exclaimed when the cell door opened. The other two looked up in alarm at the sight of a class-5 combat bot. I didn’t blame them.
“What kind of welcome is that, Z?” the Sean bot said.
I took off my helmet. “Guess who I found?”
The Sean bot gave me the robot equivalent of a dirty look. “Who found whom?” he asked sternly.
Chiraine sprang to her feet and dashed over to get a good look at the Sean bot. “Mr. Beck, I can’t believe you’re here.”
“As I told Jannigan, there will be time for debriefing later. Right now we need to get out of here.”
“Out of where?” Narcissa stammered. She was probably the most freaked out of all of them.
“I’ve located the Vostok,” the Sean bot said. “It’s docked on the level 9 rear hangar.” He nodded at Narcissa. “I am Sean Beck, by the way. At least most of Sean Beck.”
“Narcissa Holt. Pleased to meet you. I think.”
I helped Ana-Zhi to her feet. “Can you walk?”
“I think so.”
I handed her one of the K-45s and handed Narcissa the assault rifle. “You’ll make better use of this than I will.”
Then we set off. The Sean bot took point, with Narcissa right behind him. Then Chiraine—helping Ana-Zhi. I covered the rear, to make sure no one came up behind us.
Voices crackled in my helmet comm. The tone was definitely worried.
“I’m picking up chatter,” I told the team. “We’ve got some panicked Mayir on our hands.”
“Good,” the Sean bot said. “We want panicked.”
It sounded like a larger team was coming down from the upper decks. We would have to avoid the main bank of lifts.
The Sean bot paused at an intersection, then led us into an access hatch which led to a maintenance tunnel. Then it was smooth sailing until we reached a narrow shaft with a ladder that led to the lower decks.
“Not sure I can make it with my arm the way it is,” Ana-Zhi said.
“Not a problem,” the Sean bot said. He scooped her up as if she was a doll and clambered down the ladder. After an hour or so of evading maintenance drones, we made it up to level 9 and found an access tunnel that opened to a hangar.
The Baeder’s rear hangar was a warehouse-sized space cluttered with thick snaking power and data conduits, mech substations, and generators. The landing pad was mostly filled with the stingrays and a few dropships and shuttles, but at the far end stood the Vostok, up on its landing gear. A bunch of workers were unloading its contents—the crates of artifacts—onto a narrow cargo carrier train.
I wondered why they had waited so long to unload the crates. Surely they knew what was in them. Maybe it was Mayir bureaucracy.
We snuck behind some freight containers the size of my kitchen back in New Torino, and I mentally charted a route out to the ship.
“How long will it to take you to fire her up, Z?” the Sean bot asked.
Ana-Zhi jerked her thumb at Narcissa. “Ask her.”
“Oh?”
“I was the engineer on the Valerius II,” Narcissa said. “It was a Barnes J-200.”
“An old Tarpon, huh?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Close enough. You’re hired.” He turned to all of us. “I’d like to get our stuff back.”
“How?” Chiraine asked.
“They haven’t made too much progress unloading,” the Sean bot said. “We take them out, and then you guys cover me for ten minutes.”
“We’ll need to take them out quietly,” Ana-Zhi said.
“And fast,” Narcissa said.
“Yeah, I think I know how we can pull that off,” I said.
To the half-dozen workers unloading the Vostok the sight of a legionnaire leading a hulking bot towards them was a big surprise, but I quickly reassured them.
“Thought you folks could use a hand.” I jerked my thumb at the Sean bot. “It’s been reconditioned to a mech loader. Check it out.”
Out of curiosity, they followed me and the Sean bot up the loading ramp and into the hold.
“Transport those!” I commanded the bot. “Outside!”
The Sean bot made a big show of lumbering towards the closest crate.
“What is that thing?” one of the workers asked me.
“Old Jacrea security bot,” I said. “Don’t worry, it’s been completely disarmed.”
Disarmed was the code word the Sean bot and I had agreed upon. The second I uttered it, I dove for cover, and the Sean bot started blasting non-lethal tremble rounds into the workers.
The plan worked perfectly. All six Mayir were unconscious within ten seconds. And best of all, we did it without any alarms going off.
“Signal the others!”
