Sin and Grace - 36. Sin (Patreon)

The Node Spider was on the other side of the ship from me, all the way down the length of the ship. I'd re-entered closer to the stern than the bow, where the main lock was located.

Wasp might not be monitoring the heating system, but he would be watching the internal camera network for sure. Unfortunately, Cassanda hadn't been constructed in such a way that I could sneak under the floor panels or through the walls.

Never thought I'd wish that I was living in a network drama.

I was going to have to make a run for it.

Immediately, I could see a bunch of problems with that plan. Wasp had hostages, hostages that included Elaine. My stomach felt twisted and sour at the thought of those two in a room together. I didn't trust MedNet enough yet to query her status, but I could see her moving around in the lounge on my map.

She looked like she was pacing. If she was pacing that meant she wasn't injured. If she wasn't hurt, then there was a chance that Wasp hadn't realized what she meant to me—or he was saving her for later.

Working carefully, I increased the bot patrols between the command deck and the crew lounge. I seeded them with orders to mob Wasp if he tried to access the lounge. I picked out four of the biggest, meanest warbots in his crew and wiped their banks clean; a full system wipe. I replaced their operating systems from my own software library, just to make sure there were no contingency orders lurking anywhere inside their programming.

Then I handed them over to my auxiliaries as their own brand new, well, secondhand bodies with a brief overview of non-lethal neutralization actions they could use to either slow or stop Wasp in his tracks.

I expected my wunderkind to be first in line for a body, but that one was still behaving sluggishly.

Concerned, I did a quick diagnostic and found that it had recovered from a cascade failure and was still operating at a diminished capacity. I couldn't immediately see a time stamp on the event, but it must have happened while I was knocked out and the others managed to stabilize it without me. There was probably an alert buried in all the other, non-boarding action complaints I'd been fielding from my bots.

Poor baby. I snoozed it and hoped this was something I could fully repair later. It might not be. If we weren't lucky, I'd have to replace that entire node and I'd never get to see what kind of intelligent synthetics it would have produced.

The cold anger in my chest sharpened just a little bit more.

The bots in the head were already assigned to Grace as a protection detail. I could see him moving again a little bit: enough that I knew he wasn't dry drowning, but not so much that I was immediately worried that he would draw Wasp's attention.

Telling myself that I'd done all I could, I let myself out into the corridor and all but hit the deck already sprinting.

There's a funny thing that happens, when you're running with someone else's life on the line. I've heard old soldiers describe something similar, when they tell stories of racing in to rescue their allies in peril. It's like the universe starts to push back against you. Time dilates and seconds slow down until they feel like hours slipping through your fingers, more elusive than water.

That's what it felt like to me during that four minute sprint down a straight corridor while the floor felt like it was rolling backwards under my feet.

I almost didn't find the Node Spider, even with it picked out on my map. It appeared as an innocuous disc mounted nearly flush against the base of Cassandra's tiny purser's desk and comm station, just about a quarter-inch of difference. It could just as easily have been the cap for a defunct cable jack. Not only that, it's casing was almost an identical color match for the standard ivory-beige surface underneath it, which was painted to match our bulkheads.

No wonder we hadn't noticed. It was near invisible.

In that moment I swore to myself that were were going to repaint every single level a different color using custom paint blends, too. I'd get Rom to finance it if I had to and once I told him this story, he'd probably do the same in the Freeport.

We just had to survive today and make it back to port.

I hit my knees, sliding a bit as I went for the bot. Using the multitool on my belt, I tried to drive the flat of a scraping tool between it and the desk. No good. It was clamped down tight and the purser's desk was actually built into the adjoining floor and walls so the watchstander had something solid to hold onto in the event of a lock failure. Ripping out the desk wasn't going to be an option.

I flipped the multitool in my hand and pulled out the telescoping clamps out from its sides. I fixed them onto the bot and tried to twist it off the surface it clung to.

Nothing. Not even throwing my entire body-weight into the motion helped.

One of the auxiliaries ping me to alert me to another new, terrible wrinkle.

Grace was on the move. He was in the corridors, heading towards the paternoster lift at speed and he'd left his protective detail in the dust as they scrambled to keep up with him. What was he…?

The auxiliary reacted to my escalating stress and helpfully fed me some camera footage of Grace jumping into the paternoster with an enormous pipe wrench he'd gotten from somewhere. He jumped out and went straight for the command deck.

"Fuck!" I keened and redoubled my efforts to get at the Node Spider. I braced both feet against the wall and pulled with my entire body.

The footage continued in a small corner of my vision. Grace launched a sneak attack on Wasp and they wrangled for a second, before Grace got the stun wand away from him. Wasp recovered and managed to make it into the corridor. He locked Grace in behind him and turned—he turned towards the lounge.

In the camera feed, I could see Elaine's zapper in the waistband of his pants.

He couldn't kill anybody with it, but he could disable them and they wouldn't be able to resist anything he did afterwards.

My heartbeat spiked. My vision turned red. I heard a tearing sound and suddenly I was skidding across the floor on my ass, holding my multitool and the Node Spider caught in it with one hand. The cutting tools and clamps on its underside rotated for a second before retreating back into its body. Jointed legs started to emerge from the nubs on its sides and grabbed it with my free hand before I common sense could catch up with me and remind me how sturdy the little bastard was.

Sparks flew and bits of casing exploded everywhere as I crunched it in my palm.

In the camera feed, I could see my bots swarming Wasp; seizing onto his legs and forcing him to drag them along. He kicked and swore and stomped on the smaller bots before getting into his pocket and coming up with—oh no. He had one more trick on him.

I even recognized it. I had one under thumb-lock in my workshop: a Kepler Defense ASI Suppression Charge. The ASI in this case stood for 'Autonomous Systems Interdiction.' Most drivers called it the 'Brick' because that is what it would do to any bot within five meters, once it went off.

'Disengage!' I ordered my auxiliaries as I lumbered to my feet. They were housed within my body, but they wouldn't like being connected while the Brick fried the processors of their secondary bodies.

On the camera, the bots seized up and fell off Wasp as one. They hit the ground, still twitching as the lingering electronic pulses controlling their limbs faded away without purpose and Wasp went for the lounge door.

I was moving again before I really realized what I was doing. The big lift was in the wrong direction and I was in no shape to consider whether it was still functioning. I went for the paternoster.

This time there was no time-dilation as I tore back down the corridor. If anything, time sped up in direct relation to the white-hot energy building in my chest. My vision went from red to colors I couldn't begin to describe.

By the time I reached the paternoster, I could see through my flesh again and I couldn't make myself care.