Lifel1k3 (Lifelike #1)(47)

But for now, Lemon was in trouble. Kaiser was in trouble.

What choice did she have?

Hefting Excalibur, she followed the lifelike into the gloom.



Lemon was hurrying down a twisting, ribbed tunnel, following close behind Carer. The woman had Kaiser in her arms, and Lemon noticed that she was stroking the blitzhund’s damaged belly as she walked, as if trying to ease his hurts. Even though Kaiser was a cyborg. Even though his metal body couldn’t feel pain.

“How far to the third stomach?” she asked.

“Not far now,” Carer replied.

Lemon scoped her surroundings, more than a little overwhelmed. The walls churned with the movement of long, ser pentine shapes beneath the skin. The ceilings crawled with thousands of tiny creatures, translucent and insectoid. She could feel the ship’s pulse beneath her, wondered how big the heart that drove this colossal beast might be.

All her life, she’d been surrounded by tech of the old world, repurposed and recycled and rusted through. But if this was the future BioMaas had in store for the planet—living machines and thousands, maybe millions of creatures all working in perfect harmony—she found it hard to fault them for leaving the tech of the past behind.

“How long have you worked here?” she asked Carer.

The woman frowned. “We have always worked here.”

“No, I mean how many years have you served on Nau’shi?”

Carer stopped and looked at Lemon in puzzlement. “We are Nau’shi.”

A long, quavering call echoed down the corridor, and Carer’s eyes widened.

“Ohhhhh,” she moaned.

“What is it?” Lemon asked.

“The polluted.” Carer double-blinked back her tears. “They are hurting us… .”

A doorway down the corridor yawned open, and a tall, heavyset man with similar clothing to Carer’s barreled out, face twisted in fury. He was followed by several lumbering insect things, each as big as he was. They were covered in translucent shells and armed with massive claws.

“Aaaaand you’d be Facepuncher, I presume,” Lemon said.

“Unnatural!” the man bellowed, spit flying.

He hefted what looked like a hybrid of a pistol and a spiny sea urchin, took aim right at Lemon. Kaiser bucked in Carer’s arms and snarled.

The girl dove to the floor as the big man opened fire with his pistol thing, spraying the air with long black spines. But as the shots sailed harmlessly over Lemon’s head, she tracked them down the corridor and finally slapped eyes on their actual target—the six-odd feet of sexy murderbot charging down the hall right toward them.

“Hello, Dimples,” Lemon sighed.

“Hey, Freckles.”

Ezekiel moved like lightning, like silk, like liquid, running up the curved wall and tumbling over Lemon’s head through the burst of fire. Rolling down into a crouch, he swung a length of iron rebar at the shooter’s knees, chopping his legs from under him. Carer screamed, the man howled, clutching his shattered bones. Even with one arm, Ezekiel was impressive, swinging at a bug thing and splitting its head in two. The second beast chittered, taking a long, bleeding gouge out of the lifelike’s side. Ezekiel gasped, blood spraying, piroetting on the spot and plunging his weapon through the last beast’s carapace, nailing it to the wall. It snarled, coughed, its half a dozen hooks twitching feebly as it died.

Carer began wailing as the creature perished, falling to her knees and dropping Kaiser to the floor. Ezekiel kicked the pistol thing away from the big man’s outstretched hand, tore his rebar out of the shuddering wall and pointed it at the fellow’s head.

“Unnatural,” the man hissed. “Polluted!”

“Please don’t move,” the lifelike said. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

Lemon was looking at the slaughtered bug things. Back at Carer, on her knees and weeping, reaching out toward the dead creatures with a trembling hand.

“I think you already did, Dimples… .”

“Lemon!”

She looked up, saw Eve at the end of the corridor, Cricket on her shoulder. Lem rolled to her feet with a whoop and charged into her bestest’s crushing hug.

“Riotgrrl!” Lemon pulled back, nose wrinkling. “You look like ten miles of rough road. And you smell like my pits after a hard day’s work.”

“When have you ever put in a hard day’s work, Lem?” Eve grinned.

“I’m too pretty to sweat. How you doin’, Crick? Keeping our girl out of trouble?”

The little bot waved dramatically at their surroundings. “Apparently not.”

“Kaiser!”

Spotting the injured blitzhund, Eve dragged herself free of Lemon’s embrace and thumped down the corridor, skidding to her knees at Kaiser’s side. She pulled the cyborg up into a fierce hug. “You okay, boy? I was worried about you!”

Kaiser wuffed and wagged his tail, slurping at Eve with his heat-sink tongue.

“We need to move,” Ezekiel warned.

Cricket nodded. “Again, hate to agree with Stumpy. But moving. Yes.”

Eve picked up Kaiser, struggling with his weight. Lemon was watching Carer and the guy Ezekiel had clocked. The pair were on the floor, the man holding his broken leg. When he shifted his weight, he and Carer both gasped in pain.