Empress of a Thousand Skies(20)

Technically he and the NX droid were both soldiers for the UniForce. They were on the same side.

So why did Aly suddenly want to piss his pants?

“Private Alyosha Myraz,” it said, scanning his vitals. Its eyes flashed once and then turned red. “Mark identified.”

Alyosha’s knees buckled. Definitely not on the same side. No wonder Pavel had detected no additional heat signatures on board. UniForce—it had to be UniForce—had sent a droid to do their dirty work.

As the droid went for him, Aly grabbed a drawer off the floor and flung it at the NX as hard as he could, but the metal behemoth swatted it away. It smashed against the wall and splintered in two. Alyosha scrambled for more things to throw. The droid was on him quickly, and kicked its heel into Aly’s chest. Even with the giant suit Aly was wearing, the impact was like getting shot. He flew backward against the wall and took down the bulletin board, collapsing on the desk, gasping.

The military droid took hold of Aly’s leg and yanked him off the desk. Aly landed on his back on a pile of clothes, and he thanked god that Vin was such a slob. He might have broken his neck on the bare floor otherwise. And then he remembered that Vincent had taken off. A feeling wormed itself in, right there up between the pit of his stomach and the back of his heart—not just anger or sadness, but both, a sense of the unfairness of it all.

To his left he saw the hammer, and he grabbed it before the droid could kick it away. He knew it was no use. This model of droid couldn’t even die, really; it would just reboot. Still, he whacked it blindly in the direction of the droid’s control panel, roaring with sudden rage, unwilling to die in a heap of Vincent’s dirty laundry.

Then the droid ripped the hammer from his hand. It grabbed his neck, and Alyosha’s brain blinked out. He was going to die . . .

The droid went suddenly still. Its eyes went black. Its whole body began to spark. The terrible steel hands around Alyosha’s neck released, and he sat up, coughing and gasping, massaging his throat. The droid was on its back now, twitching like a dying insect. Aly turned to Pavel, who was humming loudly in overdrive.

“What . . . what did you do?” Aly asked, through the pain in his throat.

“I uploaded a virus to its operating system.” The way he said it had a lilt. Aly could almost hear the shrug in his voice.

“What virus?” Whatever Pavel had done, he was glad for it.

“A virus I just invented. I coded it now.”

Aly could’ve hugged him. He staggered to his feet, his head still dizzy and his chest like a bombed-out crater. But he was alive.

He knew the droid was being tracked, though—all military droids were—and shorting it had made them more high-profile than ever. Military droids didn’t travel solo, and reinforcements must be getting ready to storm the Revolutionary now. Aly ripped out Pavel’s comm unit, an external cube he had installed so the droid was wired to the network. Then he powered down his own cube, and stumbled. It felt like a fist had wrapped around his brain to wring out all the juice, the connectivity. He was offline. He couldn’t record anything. He couldn’t look anything up. But at least their GPS would go dark. Still, they had Aly’s heat signature to take care of.

“Let’s go,” Aly said, taking one last glance at Vin’s empty bed. He grabbed the hammer off the floor, praying Vin had bolted before some titanium beast had crushed his head like a grape.

Please let Vin be okay.

Then they ran—rather, he ran and Pavel rolled.

“How much of the medical bible do you have downloaded?” he called over his shoulder.

“Approximately thirty percent. First aid and basic surgery.”

“Anything on anesthesiology?”

“No. I’d need to go back online.”

“We can’t go back online.” Not until they were out of danger. If they were ever out of danger. Why had Kalu’s UniForce gone on the attack? Aly knew it must be because he’d found evidence the Princess might still be alive, but he was too jacked up to untangle any more of the puzzle.

They entered the medbay, and Aly barred the door behind them. He tore down medicine bottles and smashed salves onto the floor until he found what he was looking for: gel nitrogen compound. He shrugged out of the suit, then pulled off his shirt and pants and began covering his body to insulate the heat. “I need to lower my body temperature. What’s the baseline so I lose my heat signature?”

“Below twenty-two degrees Celsius, you become undetectable by standard scanning techniques. But every computable attempt carries an eighty percent chance of fatality by hypothermia.”

“Not if you resuscitate me first.” Aly started to cover his face and smeared a thick layer across the crown of his head, gooping it into his coarse hair.

Pavel was clearly flustered. Metal attachments extended and retracted as he scanned med labels and did calculations on the fly. His movements were jerky, like the old-school service droids that worked in the Wray. Pavel held up a newly filled syringe. “If I inject cathariiuum into your blood, your temperature will lower down to twenty-five degrees, and I can resuscitate you with any of the illium ions within seven minutes to prevent death.”

“You said I had to get it down to twenty-two degrees.”

“True,” Pavel said. He held up a second syringe. “But the heat sensors have a margin of error. There’s a seventy-seven percent chance you will remain undetected.”