Heart of Iron (Heart of Iron #1)(54)

He grabbed E0S out of the air and threw the bot at the female guard. With a pitiful bloop, it struck her in the side of the head.

It must have been with more force than he realized, because the female guard slumped to the floor, unconscious.

“What the—” The man spun toward him, drawing his gun, when Siege swung out her leg, knocking him in the back of the knees, sending him onto his back. She grabbed his hands, and pressed her knee against his throat.

“One, two,” Siege began counting as the man beneath her struggled. “Screw this, I’m impatient.” She slammed her fist into the man’s face and knocked him unconscious.

Then Siege unholstered the guard’s gun and stood, turning it toward Di. He froze, quickly raising his hands into the air.

“Not another step,” said the woman, her green eyes flat like sea glass.

“Not a single one,” he agreed.

She narrowed her eyes.

Captain Siege had always been imposing—the way she stood, feet apart, shoulders back, giving off the impression that she was taller than anyone else in the room—but he had not understood it. Now, in this body, while he stood a good inch taller than her, he felt short and infinitely inferior.

“How did you wake up?” she growled. Dried blood painted the side of her face from a nasty gash hidden under her flickering fire-colored hair. “Who rebooted you? What are you?”

“I . . . do not know.”

She clicked back the hammer. “I’ll ask one more time—”

“I just woke up,” he interrupted, his voice wavering. “I do not know. Captain, I am not your enemy—”

“Piss you aren’t!” she said. “Barger’s dead, Wick’s dead, my crew’s hostage, and my ship’s been taken over by Valerios. It’s awfully suspicious that a Metal the Ironblood found on that cursed ship isn’t against me, too.”

“I am not.”

“And I’m supposed to believe you?—”

Voices came from the top of the stairs.

Cursing, the captain grabbed him by the arm and pulled him back into the infirmary. She slammed the butt of the pistol against the door lock, which slid shut, and pressed the barrel against his ribs.

“I am on your side,” he stressed, “and there is a ninety-three point four-seven percent chance that the others will find those two guards soon if we do not act now.”

“Then what do you suggest?”

“I can hack into the ship’s computer from the console in here and reverse the video feeds so we can see what we are up against.”

“How do I know you aren’t lying?”

Because I am D09, he wanted to say, but how could he prove it? He was not D09, and the fear of a bullet wound was much too strange. He swallowed. “Trust goes both ways, Captain.”

Siege studied him before lowering her pistol. “You double-cross me, and you’ll get a bullet straight to the heart, got it?”

If you can find it, he wanted to reply, but simply nodded.

The computer in the infirmary was simple at best, but it seemed someone had used it recently anyway. A memory core—it must have been his—sat on a small scanner, pulsing ever so slightly. Was that how he had been transferred? Through this computer? He was lucky that whoever did the procedure had not scrambled his code. The cube—his memory core—looked so small and weak—the source of his glitches.

It was how all this trouble began.

Bitterly, he pushed it off the scanner, and it clattered to the floor. The computer hummed to life.

Fingers skimming over the keyboard, he broke into the internal server. He knew the ship’s antiquated computer system better than the back of his hand. There were at least three firewalls and a viral system, all of which he himself had installed with the utmost security. And now he bypassed them without even a second glance. He ventured a guess that it was from an upgrade to this body.

It frightened him a little, to think how easily he could undo his own work.

He reversed the video feeds into the Dossier’s rooms, instead of out of them.

A holo-screen blipped up with a map of the ship.

“All but two Valerio men are in the galley, and they are . . .”

Another holo-screen flicked up.

“In the showers? Oh, two in the showers.” He squinted at the screen. “Captain, I could be mistaken, but are they . . . ?”

“My poor, defiled ship,” she scowled, drumming her sharp fingernails on the console. “How many bullets do you think you can handle before getting dead?”

“I do not wish to find out,” he replied dryly.

“Do you think you can fit through a ventilation shaft?”

An informational file blipped up in the back of his head, a file of knowledge. He bit his bottom lip, wondering what good it would do, but did as it commanded. He raised his hand to the screen.

“What are you doing?” the captain asked. “You didn’t hear a word I said, did you?”

A tingling spread across his fingertips, and instinctively he lowered his hand to the ports on the computer’s dash. An electric sensation coursed over his skin, and he found himself—his code, his programming—pulled toward the console like a magnet. Then he was rushing across the electrical currents of the ship, spreading across the motherboard, sinking into the programs. He was the ship, but he was also in his body. He was soaring through space and staring at the holo-screens. A hundred places at once, seeing everything.