“Chief? Now would be a good time to tell me the truck secretly has a laser cannon under the hood, or something.”
“I’m afraid not. Damn it, station security is going to throw a fit over this. I’m sending a pair of warbots to intercept you, Alice. ETA one minute.
The troll in the sunroof was trying to line up shots with a laser rifle now. Ash spat out puffs of smoke to mess up her aim, but the little dragon would run out of smoke mixture soon. I didn’t have a minute.
What else could I do? I catalogued my resources, wracking my brain for a useful strategy. I was still wearing my spacesuit, but the armor wasn’t rated against rifles. I had Smoke and Ash, but they were mostly designed more for bar fights than car chases. I also had a cargo truck, with two medium and four light loading bots in the back. Oh, and a lot of cargo that I’d probably have to pay for if it got damaged.
Wait. That was it.
The cargo bots had radio control links, and I could configure a datalink to let me see through their eyes. So I could drive one remotely, and I’d seen them in operation enough to get a decent feel for how they moved. This could work.
The car was getting closer now. More trolls leaned out the passenger windows on both sides, waving pistols. One of them fired off a burst, and a rain of bullets bounced off the pavement ahead of me.
Wait, she missed? How the heck did she manage to miss? Never mind. I was only going to get one shot at this, so I’d better get it right.
I had Ash lay down a big smoke screen, using up the rest of his supplies in the process. But it meant that they couldn’t see when one of the medium loading bots jumped out of the back of the truck, slid to a stop, and then turned around and started lumbering back down the road towards them.
The bot cleared the smoke screen, and I got a good look at my pursuers through its cameras. The driver’s eyes went wide when she spotted the four hundred kilogram bot in the road not thirty meters in front of her, and she spun the wheel frantically. But loading bots can move surprisingly fast, and there wasn’t much time to react. I sent it running left to stay in her path, and then the car was plowing into it at a hundred and twenty kilometers per hour.
The impact wrecked the bot, of course. But it smashed up the car pretty well, too. The wreck ended up tumbling across the road to crunch into the side of the transitway.
Chief West chuckled. “That got the job done. You’re a ruthless little git, aren’t you?”
“Oh, are you looking through the cameras? I’m trying not to hurt them any more than I have to. Look, I think their heads are all intact. The docs can fix them back up, right?”
“No hospital in this station is going to bother with an android who doesn’t have an owner, Alice. Especially after they caused all this commotion.”
“Oh.”
Well, maybe that was why they were so mad? I looked back at the smoke and fire behind me, and was struck by a horrible realization.
“Um, Chief? I’m not going to have to pay for all that damage, am I?”
Chapter 8
The local police might be incompetent at preventing violence, but they were great at prosecuting offenders. I’d barely made it back to the ship and handed off my cargo when a squad of port proctors showed up with a warrant for my arrest. Well, they called it detainment, but I didn’t see much difference.
I was a little shocked when Chief West told me to go with them.
“The captain will sort things out,” he told me. “They just want to make sure you don’t ‘mysteriously disappear’ before the hearing. Normally they wouldn’t bother, but that thing on the expressway turned into a big mess.”
I slumped. “I guess so. Can you make sure the local security guys know that there’s a group of rebels holed up at that address I was at? If they’re going to try to kill me and get me arrested I at least want them to lose their base.”
“Already done,” he told me. “Now go with the proctors, and don’t cause any more trouble. Oh, and don’t talk to anyone. Anything you say will probably get used against you, so save it for the hearing.”
So I was escorted off the ship by four trolls in powered armor and a pair of bots that looked like giant bugs. We all piled into the back of a big armored transport, and they spent the whole trip eying me like I might suddenly go crazy and try to murder them all.
Once we arrived at the Port Authority office they sent me through prisoner processing, which meant I had to give up my space suit and go through a thorough security screening. Good thing it was all automated, because I had to go through the decontamination system naked. Once I was clean, dry and certified weapon-free the bots gave me an ugly orange jumpsuit to wear, and another group of trolls and warbots escorted me to a holding cell.
Naturally the cell isolated me from the datanet, so I couldn’t call anyone or even try to research how much trouble I was in. All I could do was sit and worry.
For hours.
Would Captain Sokol really come for me? He’d been nice enough to give me a chance, and I’d already messed it up. Why would he go to any more trouble over me? Especially if they might fine the ship for all the damage I’d caused.
What would happen to me if he didn’t show? I had no idea, but it couldn’t be good. Would they make me work off my debt? Throw me in prison? Sell me to slavers?
Did they do capital punishment in the Hoshida System? No, with their attitude there was no way they’d execute a human for killing serfs. Especially since it was their own stupid fault if anyone died. I’d tried so hard to be careful. I didn’t want to kill anyone.
Why wasn’t I more upset about it, though? In the vidshows the heroine always cried and blamed herself and thought she was a terrible person if she had to kill someone, and her friends had to hug her and reassure her that she’d only done what was necessary. But I hadn’t been stopping a nuclear terrorist, or saving the colony from a nanoplague. I was just protecting myself as best I could, and I…
I felt a little sad about it. Maybe I would have done things differently if I’d known better. But maybe not. Jenki and Renit had been dangerous, and if I’d given them even a moment to react they might have captured me again. Or killed me. I felt kind of bad about killing some poor escaped serf who just wanted to free her people, but not bad enough to let them kill me instead.
Did that make me a monster? My upbringing said yes. That only a sociopath would kill people just for her own benefit, and people like that need to be dealt with for the good of the community. Was that true, or was it just more of the self-serving propaganda the matrons pushed on us?
I realized I had no idea. I didn’t really believe in the values the matrons had tried to teach me, but I didn’t have anything else to believe in either. I didn’t know what to think.
I felt my eyes start to water, and wiped the tears away before they could start. I really was hopeless, wasn’t I? If I got out of this mess I needed to learn to do better.