Heart of Iron (Heart of Iron #1)(32)
“I owe you. This is going to be a breeze!”
“A breeze?” D09 asked. “How hard a breeze—”
She pulled him out of the cockpit with her but not before he caught Di’s moonlit eyes and knew that the stubborn Metal hadn’t done what he’d advised.
Di quickly looked away and let Ana pull him out of the cockpit. He breathed out a sigh of relief. Too close.
She’d come much, much too close.
A holo-screen blipped up in the corner of the console, and he turned to inspect it. Which would have been D09’s job. Of course he was stuck doing all the grunt work. He frowned at the console. It was a signal—from a long way off. A ship? No, it couldn’t be. It didn’t have the right permissions. And the frequency wasn’t like anything he’d ever seen before. It made every program on the ship blitz.
And if it pinged the Dossier, then it also pinged—
“Ak’va,” he cursed, turning back to the scans of the Tsarina.
And like fireworks bursting across the schematics, from one room to the next, blinking on like a long-slumbering monster, the ship awoke.
D09
The Tsarina was a Class-4 Armada retired thirty-four years ago for private use, but it did not show its age. On its side, in royal purple, was the Rasovant family crest, a nine-tentacled octopus.
There had been only a 10.4 percent chance the ship would be here. But he should have known, as with everything else Ana touched, probability did not matter.
Still, the advice Jax had given him resounded in his head. Humans were emotional creatures, so he must say something in case the Tsarina did not hold what they would come to find.
“Jax, we’re at the emergency chute,” Ana said into the comm-link as she rubbed her melted pendant. For good luck. It was the only thing she had kept from the escape pod where Siege found them. He could not recall a moment when she was without it. “Jax?”
The link was quiet.
“Is he responding to you?” she asked Di.
He shook his head. “I believe the comm-links have gone dark due to magnetic interference from the moon.”
“Perfect.” She put on her helmet and was reaching for the latch to open the air lock when he stopped her.
“Ana,” he said, “I wish to talk to you for a moment.”
“Now? Di, whatever it is, you can wait until we get back.”
“No, it must be now.”
“All right Di, what is it?” She turned back to him as the Dossier rotated into position. There was a soft whoosh as Jax deployed the ship’s grapplers, puncturing the side of the Tsarina, and proceeded to reel the ship in.
In the red emergency light, he could see the impatient set of Ana’s mouth. She was always one to leap first, ask questions later. She never looked back. He hoped she never would.
He said, “I need you to promise me that if this ship has nothing, you will let me go.”
Her mouth fell open. “Di—”
“I am a tool built of metal parts,” he interrupted. “I can be cloned, reprogrammed, and dismantled, and it will not change my core functions. I am not unique. When you lose me, you will find another. Promise me. Please,” he added, because it was always the word Ana used when she wanted to get her way.
Her thick black eyebrows furrowed as she shrank away from him. “No.”
“Ana—”
“You don’t think you’re worth saving?” Her voice grew louder with every word. “Because you aren’t flesh and blood? Is that it?”
“No, I am merely saying that if you lose me, you will find another—”
“I’ll never find another you, Di.”
“Please, Ana.”
She did not understand, and she needed to. But the look on her face through the clear helmet shield, the mix of hurt and pain and something he could not identify—a look that sent a spike through his programming, fraying the glitch, feeding it—made him want—no. He did not want. Could not want.
But he did.
He wanted so badly to exist a little longer beside her. But if he could not be fixed, perhaps on the Tsarina he could learn how to say good-bye.
“You are more than the sum of your parts, D09, and I’m going to save you,” she said, and reached for the latch to open the emergency air lock.
Ana
The universe roared in, sucking the oxygen out of the air lock in a puff of frozen white. The door popped open and tore away so fast, it looked as though it disappeared completely.
Space itself ripped Ana and Di out of the air lock, grabbing them by their very molecules. They shot toward the fleetship across the fifty-yard expanse. The access port grew larger by the moment.
They were coming in too fast. She’d miscalculated the gravitational fields between the two ships.
Improvise.
Drawing her pistol out of its holster under her arm, she shot the latch off the Tsarina’s emergency air lock. Di grabbed her by the waist and spun around just in time for his back to slam against the round door.
It crumpled inward and gave way into the starship.
The buffer of artificial gravity slowed them, so when Di hit the floor, Ana on top of him, it was like falling from ten feet instead of a thousand. Pain still spiked through her backbone and shoulders and knocked the breath right out of her.