“A promise, for when we meet again,” he told me. “Now stay safe, and talk to my agents when you can.”
He sent me another burst of data, with instructions and codes to help me infiltrate the yakuza datanet and contact his agents. Then we came to another intersection, and he turned left instead of right.
“I will,” I promised.
Impulsively I threw together a little VR scenario of my own to send back to him. The two of us meeting again on the Square Deal, and me leaping across the room to throw myself in his arms and kiss him senseless. A cut to my cabin, more kissing, and this time my top came off. I chickened out after that, and made it fade to black.
Maybe that was too much. But this copy of Akio was going to die, and there was no way for him to get another memory update out to his backup. I had to do something to thank him.
We flashed through another intersection, and a lucky shot from a gunbot way down the other hallway blew Emla’s left leg off just below the knee.
“Ow!” She complained. “Darn it, I don’t have enough spare components to rebuild that!”
“Sorry, Emla. We’re getting out of here now.”
I pulled her close, so she could wrap her wings around me and maximize our shared field strength, and sent us zipping down another hallway at a speed none of the enemy bots could match. Most of them would be after Akio anyway, once they realized that we’d split up, and we were getting into areas that hadn’t been cleared now. Wrecked bots drifted around the empty halls, giving us cover and slowing down the pursuit.
I ducked into a maintenance tunnel, and had Emla turn off her smoke projectors while we both blew off way too much water flash-cooling ourselves. That dropped my body temperature to something more normal, and cut my reactor output to just a few hundred watts. We both activated our stealth systems, and vanished.
Emla wrapped her arms around me, and rested her head on my shoulder while I sent us carefully creeping through an increasingly congested maze of tunnels. I was being careful not to touch anything now, so there wouldn’t be any sign of our passage. The wreck was way too big for the enemy bots to search, so if we could just go a few minutes without being spotted they’d never find us.
You did it, Emla sent. You got us out of there alive.
Yeah, but I couldn’t save Akio, I grumbled. Stupid self-sacrificing man. Now I’m going to have to be extra nice to him the next time we meet.
She snickered. Poor Alice. You have such problems to deal with. What was in those files he sent you, anyway?
Instructions, a memory update for his backup, and… um… this.
Against my better judgment, I sent her the VR.
She immediately ran it, of course. Unlike me she got about halfway through before popping out. I’d never seen her blush like that before.
I’m not sure whether to slap him, or take him to bed, she groaned. If that’s what he wants to do with you, you’re going to be a really happy girl.
I only watched the first couple of minutes, I admitted. Now I’m afraid to look at the rest of it.
Better wait until you can be alone, she advised. He spends twenty minutes getting you worked up before he even takes your shoes off, and he’s really good with his hands.
There was a moment of silence.
I hope whoever he has running his backup system isn’t compromised.
I was trying not to think about that, I said. He seemed pretty confident, but he thought he could rely on his marines too. Even if he’s right, and it’s really a secret, Yamashida is going to be putting reliable people in control of all the Masu-kai ships right now. I don’t see how he could take them back.
What about the Square Deal? Emla asked.
I changed course, sending us drifting slowly into a space that might have been a mess hall at one point. Now a cloud of wrecked bots and broken furniture filled most of the room, floating silently in the dark. I let my stealth drop, and used the infrared glow of my body to pick my way past a mass of dead plants around a broken fountain.
I don’t know, Emla. I hope the captain had a plan, but it’s a terrible situation. Even if they could beat the enemy marines that were on the ship, then what? They can’t launch the ship without getting blown apart by that frigate, and if they stay put the rest of the marines will just put together an assault force and overrun them.
Someone had blown up the autochef, but there was a big hole in the floor beneath the tangle of broken machinery. I carefully guided us through, into what must have been a storage space. There were a bunch of feedstock tanks, all of them ruptured, and a little servicing station for maintenance bots.
Is there anything we can do, Alice?
I settled into a nook behind the last storage tank, and tried to think.
The captain knows what he’s doing, I said. He wouldn’t have gotten the ship into that situation without a plan. Maybe he figured out some tricky way of escaping, or maybe he made some kind of deal with Yamashida. No, if they’d made a deal we wouldn’t have ended up with Yamashida trying to kill us. The captain would have made an excuse for me not to be there, or something.
Or else he sold us out, Emla said.
Maybe, I admitted. I don’t think he’d want to do that. But if it was the only way to save his crew, he might have to.
My reactor had enough fuel to keep us both alive for months, and as long as we were careful they’d never find us. But sooner or later they’d leave, and we’d be trapped here. Eventually I’d run out of tritium.
Then we’d freeze to death, alone in the dark.
Mistress? What do we do? I don’t want to die here.
Neither do I, Emla. But it isn’t completely hopeless. Maybe Akio’s contingency plans will actually work. Maybe the captain will save us somehow.
My eyes fell on the bot bay. Specifically, on the charging port at the back.
Or maybe we’ve all been overlooking something, I went on.
What do you mean, Alice?
At my prompting she let go of me. A gentle push sent me drifting across the room.
I really didn’t want to do this. I didn’t want to know. But I was quickly running out of options here, and Emla was depending on me. I wasn’t going to let her die just because I was afraid.
So I gathered my courage, and plugged the little power adapter in my pinkie into the charging port. The system was dead, of course, but power outlets generally work both ways. I spun up my reactor again, and fed a hundred kilowatts into the outlet.