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  Charlie7 twitched a sad smile. “You’re like them, you know. Genetics and upbringing both; I suppose some similarity is inevitable. But Abby only pretends to order me around. Eve gets away with pretending a little more convincingly. But I don’t take orders from anyone, especially not a young, freshly released hostage high on adrenaline.”

  “I’m forty-six!” Kaylee protested.

  “I’ve had sneezes that lasted longer,” Charlie7 replied flippantly. “But don’t get in a snit. Abby passed me something just before embarking on this crazed scheme of hers. She said to give it to you. It’s DNA encoded. I could crack it easily enough, but it’ll be quicker if you do it.”

  Kaylee snatched the tiny sliver of a data crystal from his hands and borrowed a portable from Dana. Hers was still in the theater with Ned’s gang. When Charlie7 attempted to follow her out the tent, she stabbed a finger in his direction. “Stay.”

  Pulling up short, the robot blinked.

  “If there’s anything you need to know, I’ll share it with you. Since it’s DNA encoded, it might be family business.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Kaylee’s fingers shook as she sat on the seat of the washroom toilet with her pants up. It was the closest source of privacy she could find. The data crystal resisted her initial, clumsy attempts at insertion into the mayor’s portable, but after a calming series of breaths, she tried again with better luck.

  The DNA encoding was broken simply by having handled the crystal. The portable opened the message instantly.

  “Kaylee, dear. I’m heading off to Mars in the next few minutes. I don’t have long. If everyone else has gotten out safe and unharmed, I’m happy that my life was spent to some noble end. If the hostages are still in danger, and I’ve become one of them, I’m sorry. It’s a crazy plan, I know, but it’s the only one I’ve got, and if you’re reading this and they’re still captive, I must have tried swapping places with you. It was the only way I could think of to get you out of there without caving in to Ned Lund’s wild demands.

  “Kaylee, I need you. The backup plan is a last-ditch gambit. I promise I’ll do whatever I can, but if I can’t save everyone, I need you to get the only help that might. Under no circumstances are you to let Charlie7 handle negotiations or try some sort of damn fool heroics that could get everyone killed.

  “Go to Earth. I’m enclosing coordinates. There’s a reclusive old sack of servos who might be the only one with a solution. Say it was me who sent you.

  “Good luck.

  “Grammy Abby.

  “P.S. I love you, and I wouldn’t burden you with this if I didn’t trust you to get the job done.”

  For a woman who only claimed to have a “few minutes” to leave final instructions, Grammy Abby had certainly filled up a page.

  Taking liberties with Dana’s portable, Kaylee punched in the coordinates left for her. They were for a tiny, remote island that hadn’t been inhabited in her lifetime. There would be time for mysteries later.

  Plucking the data crystal from her borrowed portable computer, Kaylee marched for the door, reconsidered, used the washroom unhurried for the first time in days, then swept out into the wider colony to confront a certain old robot.

  “Charlie7,” Kaylee called out. “We’re leaving. Prep a spacero.”

  Charlie7 exited the tent, ducking under the flap with a shrewd look in his optic sensors. “What’d Abby tell you?”

  “That you need to get me back to Earth on the double. She’s going to do what she can, but we’re the new backup plan.”

  She couldn’t exactly tell Charlie7 that keeping him out of the Martian situation was a key part of that plan, but of all the intelligent creatures in the solar system, none had less grounds to complain about someone keeping secrets than Charlie7.

  Less than twenty minutes later, a transport tech loaded Kaylee into a rapid-transit pod in the back of a spacero. She was a young woman, Martian-born and perky. She ran through a detailed list of warnings and precautions too quickly for Kaylee’s harried mind to absorb. All too soon, she strapped Kaylee into place as the pod filled with a syrupy goo that might never come out of her clothing. It was a non-Newtonian G-shielding fluid that would allow Charlie7 to pilot the spacero as if he had a robotic passenger, not a fragile human one along.

  The process had been more unpleasant than anything the Chain Breakers had done to her. Wires and probes stuck to her skin all over. A respiration mask covered Kaylee’s nose and mouth, with tubes running down to her lungs, coated in an anesthetic film that kept her from gagging on them.

  The transport tech pressed Kaylee’s head back and packed it in place with foam blocks, including some weird devices that felt like suction cups over her eyes. “This is the worst part,” the tech warned. “This is a hyper-oxygenated fluid. Don’t try to breathe it. The pump will circulate it for you. I know… easier said than done. But the less you fight, it the more comfortable you’ll be.”

  Blind and immobile, Kaylee fought back a wave of panic as the syrup flowed up over her chin, then into her ears, around the cups protecting her eyes. A muted thump must have been the pod door sealing shut over her.

  She couldn’t expand her lungs, the fluid pressure around her was like a sack of concrete on her chest. The thin trickle of air from the tubes was replaced by a sensation of drowning as fluid rushed in to fill her lungs.

  Kaylee thrashed and tried to gasp, tried to cough it out. But the fluid and pod restraints held her motionless. She couldn’t fight back against the liquid the pod pumped into her. Rationally, she knew it was for her protection, that she’d get all the oxygen she needed, regulated and metered with exacting precision. Yet her instincts forced her to struggle against the intrusions and alien sensations until she was too exhausted to resist.

  There was no sensation from outside the pod. They’d warned her of the lack of communication between the pod and cockpit during transit. They’d also warned her that she couldn’t be asleep because the life support system wasn’t designed to safely regulate a comatose passenger. So she’d be stuck like this, quite literally, for hours.

  And while everyone had assured her that, under these conditions, the trip from Mars to Earth could be made in a fraction of the time it normally would require, no one had told her that the trip would feel like years trapped motionless, drowning, and cut off from all sensory input.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Abby held her arms out to her sides and spun slowly on her heel. The cloth-o-matic garments were pleasantly warm if devoid of style entirely. It was a worse torture for the poor machine than the theater’s inhabitants likely faced, a costuming fabricator forced to produce the bland, colorless garments. She twisted her neck to check out her profile in the mirror.

  “Didn’t ask my measurements, and I doubt Mars has them on file,” Abby said offhandedly. “That must mean I can still share clothes with my granddaughter.”

  “She filled it out better,” Lester Saito remarked. Abby suspected he didn’t realize she knew who he was or that she remembered him from before he emigrated to Mars. And if he had to watch a raisin-skinned version of Kaylee change clothes for “security reasons,” it served him right. The ogling was worse for him than her, she assured herself.

  “Well, you see how well eighty-one extra years sit on your bones,” Abby said sharply.

  At that point, Ned Lund reentered the room with that fellow Gregor at his side. “Damn clones,” he muttered after a moment of studying her face. “Could’ve been I left Kaylee in here and she used the makeup kit.”

  Abby lifted her chin. “Collar away. I’m not the least bit frightened of you.”

  Ned shook his head. “First things first. We’ve got to be sure you’re not concealing any tricky tech.”

  Abby arched an eyebrow, then titled her head toward Lester. “Ask this one. He watched me the whole time, though I imagine he better enjoyed leering at my granddaughter.”

  “You could have anything in you,” Ned countered. He too
k a device from Gregor and approached. “We’ve got to wipe you to be sure.”

  Abby stiffened. “I assure you, I’m not my mother. I neither transmit nor receive data feeds.” She tried to keep her breath from quickening, her pulse from racing. Backing up one step was as far as she got before Lester’s firm hand rested against her back, blocking further retreat. “I do have a number of cybernetics that I rely on.”

  Ned walked up and jabbed a finger against her sternum. “Got a real, live heart in there?”

  “Yes,” Abby replied softly.

  “Lungs?” he asked without removing his finger.

  Abby nodded.

  Ned tapped a finger against her forehead. “How about that brain of yours: synapses or crystal?”

  “Biological,” Abby replied.

  “Hold her up,” Ned ordered, and Lester hooked his hands under Abby’s armpits.

  Abby shut her eyes and held her breath.

  The EMP machine clacked, the sudden pulse hitting her like a sledgehammer inside her own skull. They swept the device down her, disabling each and every technological upgrade that relied on electronics of any sort.

  Abby’s left arm was a limp collection of dead servos. Her hips and knees gave a whirring of forced motor action as her weight sagged into Lester’s custody, unable to support her.

  All along Abby’s spine, magnetically floated artificial vertebrae now ground together like ill-fitting gears, sending glass-shard pain all up and down her back.

  When she opened her eyes, the fully cybernetic implants conveyed no vision.

  She heard the gasps without knowing who among them had been most horrified.

  “Perhaps, this precaution went too far,” Gregor suggested haltingly.

  “Damn cyborg,” Lester grunted in her ear. “Heavier than a little bird-boned thing like this should be. Give me a hand.”

  As rough hands took her ankles and lifted her from the floor, Abby reached across with her good hand and dragged her cybernetic arm across her body. The twisting motion of her spine was like forcing it through a meat grinder.

  “Set her down in the seats,” Ned ordered. “Damn, bloody robots. She’s practically one of them.”

  “Oh, wouldn’t that be nice,” Abby remarked lightly through teeth clenched against the pain. Every bounce and jostle as two Neddites lugged her along was a fresh, searing stab wound. “Shut off all those annoying little malfunction errors. Not so lucky, though. But give me a few minutes to collect myself, and we can resume negotiations.”

  Chapter Forty

  Kaylee vomited.

  It was her first reaction to breathing a mixture of air and silvery slime supposedly aerated to sustain her better than the real thing. The shower at Franklin Hospital poured warm water over her, rinsing the gels and fluids down the floor drain as she coughed on hands and knees, trying to acclimate herself amid sensations of vertigo and a burning down her throat and trachea.

  The delay felt like an indulgence. But Charlie7 hadn’t needed to know the details of the plan just yet. Set it in motion, get too far, then allow him in on the scheme. That was Kaylee’s plan.

  Yet for all she knew, Mars had turned into a graveyard, and Alan was dead. And here she was, shivering and puking beneath a waterfall of pure, clean water.

  “No rush,” Charlie7 said from the doorway, voice echoing on the tile interior walls. “You’re no good to anyone until you pull yourself together.”

  Pull yourself together, she echoed in her mind. That was the only task worth focusing on just then.

  Kaylee took long, slow breaths, punctuated by occasional coughing as she emptied the last of the nutrient medium from her lungs. “Why isn’t this a more popular way to travel?” she croaked.

  Charlie7’s chuckle answered first. “They hadn’t used that rig in years. Hardly anyone’s ever in enough of a hurry. These days, your kind is more likely to stretch the trip out and make it a week in relative comfort.”

  Short of breath and clawing her way to a nearby towel, Kaylee dragged herself from beneath the shower flow. She dressed in spare clothes that someone had conveniently commed ahead for her. Suspiciously, the outfit was a favorite from her Earth years and only programmed into her cloth-o-matic back at her old home in Paris.

  She exited the shower room fully dressed and drying the last of the water from her hair. Kaylee’s innards felt scraped clean—the raw, pink sort of clean that had removed a layer of skin but clean nonetheless. She needed a meal, a beer, and a half-day trip to a spa.

  Kaylee settled for getting back to her task. “Where’s the landing pad?”

  “I think you need a stop first,” Charlie7 said with surprising tenderness in his voice. He led Kaylee down a short corridor to a room reserved for a single VIP patient.

  Great-Grammy Eve was a ghost of herself. Hooked up to tubes and wires, her every vital system was summed up in graphs and data dumps spread across a dozen screens around the room, all carefully out of the patient’s field of view. A rhythmic hiss of forced, mechanical breathing brought back a vivid reminder of Kaylee’s own recent adventure.

  Imagine not being able to escape to breathe on her own at the conclusion of the trip. Kaylee suppressed a shudder for her great-grandmother’s sake.

  “Oh, look,” a voice modulator tucked at Eve’s side said in her voice. “Another visitor. Had I known dying would make me so popular, I’d have tried it years ago.”

  Kaylee donned a smile and came over to her great-grandmother’s side. “I came from Mars just now. Sorry if I’m a little bedraggled.”

  Eve raised one eyebrow a twitch. “You. Bedraggled? I can imagine what I must look like then. Is there a word far enough below bedraggled?”

  “For 148, you look great,” Kaylee said.

  “Historically,” Eve said via the box, “148 years looked like two dates and a name listed on a stone marker.”

  “I’d like to stay longer,” Kaylee said with a pang in her stomach unrelated to hunger. “But I have work to do to help the hostages on Mars.”

  “I’m aware,” Eve replied. She blinked her eyes rapidly to draw attention to them. “I can see the news feeds, still. Damn fool daughter of mine.”

  “You’ll see Grammy Abby again,” Kaylee said. “I promise.”

  “Don’t make promises you know you can’t keep,” Eve admonished, still great-grandmothering from her hospital bed. “Reputations are more valuable than comforting lies.”

  “I’ll try to remember,” Kaylee said with a wink before ducking out the door.

  “If you have a plan you’d like to share, I’m all ears,” Charlie7 said. “It’ll have to be a quick one if you have any intention of keeping that promise. I know Abby’s not going to put up with traveling the way you just did.”

  “I need to borrow your spacero,” Kaylee said.

  “I really hate that term,” Charlie7 replied. “Where are we going?”

  “Just me,” Kaylee said. “I’ll keep it under 7-G and try not to scratch the paint. Nothing out of atmosphere; I just need the closest ride.”

  “Mind telling me what’s going on?”

  “Yes.”

  Charlie7 snorted a chuckle. “OK. I’ll play along. But I’m going to want answers soon.”

  Kaylee handed back the DNA-encoded chip. “Eve has the right DNA. There’s a message for her too. Watch it together.”

  And with that, Kaylee was off. She tore through the hospital, dodging staff and equipment in the halls. When she reached Charlie7’s spacero, she dodged around the transport pod, still dripping gel on the concrete where they’d extracted her, and hopped in.

  Her destination, provided by her grandmother, was a tiny island in the South Pacific by the name of Rapa Nui—also known as Easter Island.

  Chapter Forty-One

  As a rule, Abby abhorred vandalism. Today, she was feeling charitable. Her vandals admitted their acts, even asked her approval. It wasn’t that the theater chairs were naturally uncomfortable, it was just that she was in no fit shap
e to use them as the theater designer intended them.

  Thus it was that Abby Fourteen reclined in a fold-down seat with the chair in front of her torn from its moorings and flipped around to act as a makeshift ottoman. It wobbled precariously if she shifted in her seat, but as each movement was an agonized grating of scrap metal in practically every joint in her body, Abby was inclined to keep still.

  The collar had been a mild indignity by comparison. Explosively separating her shoulders from her head at least would have put an end to the pain.

  Not that she would give Ned Lund and his cronies the satisfaction.

  The other hostages cooed over her like first-time parents over a sick newborn.

  “Is that comfortable?”

  “How about now?”

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Let me get that for you.”

  She let them nursemaid her, knowing that it kept their mind off their own predicament. However, she wasn’t at the Arthur Miller Theater on holiday.

  “Can I get you anything?” one of them asked.

  “Yes,” Abby replied. “Ned Lund.”

  There was a squeamish silence. Then one of her fellow hostages suggested, “Maybe that’s not a good idea, considering your condition.”

  “I just want to talk to him, not arm wrestle,” Abby replied briskly.

  One of her nannies departed, bare feet slapping the floor as he headed off. Truth be told, she had a headache fit to split firewood. The sooner she said her piece to Ned, the sooner she might nod off and regain some of her strength.

  Her breath wheezed through a bronchial filter that was no longer self-cleaning.

  “What’s up?” Wil asked. She’d never gotten a good look at the other hostages, but she’d made a point of learning her captors by voice. “Whatever you need Ned for, I’ll take care of.”