Seven

[keaalu]

     “What was that?”

     For a creature that would have spent most of its life living in a sort of hive, Fred had got awfully jumpy all of a sudden, Slipstream mused, glaring, as he plucked Fred down off the top of his head. “If you really have to cling to me, you can ride on my shoulder, not my helm,” he groused.

     “But did you not hear?” the felnid challenged, crowding instantly up close to Slipstream’s audios once he was securely back on his friend’s shoulder.

     “Did I not hear… what?” Slipstream frowned, confused.

     “That noise!” Fred was genuinely upset, because he was shaking, but what he was upset about was fairly un-interpretable. “Did not hear?”

     “Well, obviously not, or I wouldn’t be asking you.” Slipstream lifted a hand and gently closed his fingers on Fred’s tiny hands, hoping to relay a little comfort; Fred clung to him, firmly. “It was probably just machinery.”

     Fred muttered unhappily under his breath in his native language, and shook his head, but didn’t argue the point. He strongly suspected that it wasn’t just machinery, and was a little irked at being dismissed so out of hand by the same person that had been happily freaking out over ‘noises’ when he hadn’t known what had been making the noises, either, earlier.

     Slipstream had turned into quite the dispirited mess over the last day or so, Mirii recognised, sadly. Whether it was losing part of the hunting party, or simply his inability to find either of them, she wasn’t sure, but he was certainly plodding a lot more than he had been. She curled her hand up over his arm, gently.

     “What?” He looked down at her.

     “Nothing.” She smiled for him. “I just wanted to remind you that you are not alone in this.”

     “I know that.” Slipstream managed a watery smile in return.

     “Do you? Because you will not discuss your concerns with us, and we wish only to help you.”

     “Well, it’s… not that important…”

     “A problem shared is a problem halved, remember?” She squeezed her fingers on his arm – not sure if he’d even feel it, with that thickly plated exterior, but hoping to convey a little comfort all the same. “We want only to help you – correct, Fred?”

     Fred nodded, decisively, and rubbed cheeks.

     Slipstream concentrated on keeping his feet moving over the floor, looking… guilty.

     Mirii voiced a quiet inward sigh, and kept pace with him. Another successful conversation non-starter. “I almost dare not ask if you have picked any signals up yet.”

     “Nothing yet…”

     Slipstream might have said more, if not for the interruption. Fred jumped hard at the noise, and clung more tightly to Slipstream’s shoulder, tucking right up alongside his neck, and this time, now they were all listening for it, they all heard it. A long, rolling booom that seemed to come right up out of the bowels of the planet, but so low-pitched it was outside of most creatures’ normal range of hearing.

     “Still think machines?” Fred challenged, shakily.

     “Okay,” Slipstream agreed, quietly. “Maybe that’s not a machine. But what in the Pit actually is it?” He cast a hopeful glance at Mirii, but she spread her hands, helplessly.

     “I wonder if it is perhaps a pump, of some sort?” she suggested, vainly. “I do not doubt that some of these drains pass below the water table and would be prone to flooding.”

     “That didn’t sound like a pump, to me,” Slipstream argued, and Fred shook his head in agreement. “Sounded like a, a… horn, or something.”

     “I do not imagine sewers have much needs for fog alarms,” Mirii joked, awkwardly, and a ripple of tension-easing amusement passed through the little group. “I wonder if it may have been an animal?”

     “Pretty loud for just an animal,” Slipstream argued.

     “Perhaps.” Mirii inclined her head. “There are some creatures living on the savannah on my world that are comparable in volume, and they also emit their vocalisations in infrasound… Fred? Is everything all right?”

     Slipstream turned his head, fractionally; the felnid was still huddled up to his neck, all four hands jammed down over his ears.

     “They don’t want us here,” the little creature stuttered out, awkwardly.

     “They? Who’s they?” Slipstream lifted him down, gently; Fred attached himself to one of his hands, shaking. “Freddie? Come on…”

     “Don’t want us here,” Fred repeated, quietly. “Not supposed to be this deep.”

     “Who doesn’t, Fred? There’s no-one here. Just us.”

     “You don’t hear it?” Fred stared up into his face, almost beseechingly. “When the boom comes, they speak. Tell us to leave.” He lowered his voice and huddled closer to Slipstream’s thumb. “They say we may die if we get closer.”

     Slipstream cast an angry glance around himself. “They dare threaten us when they don’t even dare show their faces?” he challenged, loudly.

     “Maybe we should move on, just in case,” Mirii suggested, quietly. Slipstream shot her a glare, but before he could speak, she elaborated; “We do not know how many ‘they’ may number. There may be a great many of them!”

     “Yeah, and I bet that’s exactly what they want you to think,” the mech hissed, softly. “Could be dozens of them. Could only be three paranoid little natives, trying to scare us off. Could even be our target, anxious that we’re getting too close to him.” Leaving Fred shaking in Mirii’s arms, he stood and faced into the gloom, headlamps blazing out on full, just in case there was anyone slinking in the shadows. “Well it’ll take more than tormenting the smallest member of our party to scare us off, Firewire! Because I know you’re out there!”

     “Slipstream-!” Mirii caught his arm, alarmed. “Please, m’chi, that is not a good idea!” Before he could answer, she added, “And I know that is what you think they want us to believe, to be too scared to challenge them, but we do not know who is out there! And challenging an unseen enemy to a battle of wills does not seem to be the wisest course of action, particularly since we are in their domain.”

     Slipstream met her gaze for several long seconds before backing down. “All right.” He curled his lip, bitterly. “I’ll be a good little mech and stop rocking the boat.” Folding his arms, he extinguished his lamps, and set off down the pipes again.

     “That was not necessarily what I meant,” Mirii argued, gathering a still mumbling Fred up against herself, and followed the angry Policebot. “Forgive me, Fred, I think I should like to leave here too, but that may not be on the cards just yet.”

     Fred snuggled as close to her as he could manage, quivering. “Do not want to die,” he repeated.

     “I know, dear, and I do not particularly relish the concept either.”

     She noticed almost too late to avoid running into him that Slipstream had stopped short in the middle of the tunnel; she managed to stagger to a halt just in time. “What? What is it?”

     “Creature,” he reported, bluntly, and she looked past him to see it just outside the pool of light formed by one of those dingy lightbulbs.

     It was a heavy quadruped creature, with a low, swinging head and short, squat limbs, and a long, narrow beak, fringed by a margin of mobile tentacles, waving like water-weed in a slow current. It wasn’t too large – maybe three quarters of Mirii’s height at the top of its humped back – but Slipstream was understandably wary, since those electrical creatures hadn’t been very large either.

     It lowered its head and gave another of those infrasonic booooms, and Fred squeaked unhappily in alarm and scuttled around to Mirii’s back, hiding his head in her short hair. She could very nearly feel his heart beating, through the soles of his little feet, and he’d started up that mantra again; they don’t want us here we need to go we’re too deep in their territory please we need to leave they want us dead.

     “Easy, Fred,” she whispered, holding one of his small hands in her own. “We will just… come back the way we came. All right…?”

     She felt him nod, where he was pressed up against her neck, and turned to head back in the opposite direction. “Ah. Um. Slipstream…”

     “Not now, Mirii,” he urged, half-irritably. “I think I can see where that thing has a weak spot, if we’re careful we can get past it.”

     “ Yes now, Slipstream.”

     He glanced down as she bumped against him, watched as her hand sneaked its way into his own, and at last brought his gaze up to look in the same direction she was, looking up the corridor in the direction they’d come from, uneasily.

     …spanning the corridor was a row of alien beings – mostly those little fuzzy bipeds they’d already encountered, but also a couple of taller, hairless ones, almost Mirii’s height on those elongated toe-walking legs. All were silent, and all were watching them, with cold, hostile, unfriendly looks in their dark eyes. And all were armed – if not with knives, then with wicked-looking guns, casting an eerie greenish glow over the place.

     “Get back behind me,” Slipstream whispered, softly, moving just in front of them to emphasise the point. “If it comes down to a fight, I stand a better chance of winning…”

     “We could just talk to them,” Mirii suggested, thinly.

     “And say what?”

     “That we mean them no harm. If they have lived down here for a long time, I doubt they will know what you are – or what I am, for that matter.”

     “Or maybe they’re not going to give us the chance,” Slipstream commented, watching as the tallest of the aliens lifted his hand and demonstrated a small glowing greenish ball. The little mech snapped a hand laser into place, and carefully shot out a low-powered pulse of blue energy that flicked the green ball out of the marauder’s hand. “If you’re going to plead our innocence, please hurry up and do it.”

     The creature gave another boom and Fred lost his nerve; preferring to take his chances with the beast behind them, he bolted. His sudden departure startled Mirii, who in turn made Slipstream jump, and in the split second they were distracted, the alien pitched the green ball at them, scoring a tidy impact on the upper front of Slipstream’s chest.

     “Ow!” Slipstream took a single step forwards… and the device – or grenade, or whatever it was – went off by his foot.

     He felt the pulse crackle through his static envelope and burn over his exterior, and even as the thought ‘slag it, EM pulse’ registered and he pinged a command to just run dammit to his legs, he knew that there’d be no running from this… But his vision crazed into meaningless static and he was unconscious before his head had even impacted the dirt.

0o0o0o0o0
      Uugh.

     Where am I?

     Cognitive pathways rebooted. Checking circuit patency… All green. Logic/emotional intermix all normal.

     Core harmonic: stable. Spark: stable. Magnetic bottle: stable, power intermix good, no major spikes recorded this time index.

     Audio receptors: rerouting power, please wait.

     Optics: offline. Rerouting power, please wait.

     What happened?

     Vocaliser: offline. Reboot required

     Gyroscopes: offline. Reboot and recalibration required.

     Motor complex: offline. Power levels insufficient. Rescan and reboot to be attempted at next time index point.

     Positional fix: unable to fulfil command. Antennae non-functional.

     …uuugh.

     As always (damn it), Celerity’s body reactivated the circuits requiring least energy first of all – which mean consciousness resumed long before the rest of the body had reinitialised. She’d wandered in a murky soup of nothing but thoughts for an hour or two already, wondering if this was it, had she really burned out something crucial, was she going to be a big senseless useless immobile brain for the rest of her life? All her meagre energy supplies seemed to be going on her brain and central harmonic, maintaining (with difficulty) the patency of her magnetic bottles and keeping her alive.

     At last, her core generator finally stabilised, and resumed output of enough energy to run more than one system at a time – it’d take a while for everything to come back online, after a shock like that, but things were picking up, at least. She could just about hear, through the squealing distortions of a poor calibration, and the snow of static she looked out on was beginning to clear and coalesce into something coherent… At least she had some proprioceptors online, so she knew roughly which way was up, but none of her gyroscopes were online, and the spindles all faced in different directions, so to say she was nauseatingly dizzy just didn’t cut it.

     Feel like purging a tank, she decided. Good job my pumps aren’t online…

0o0o0o0o0
     She’d never seen the Pit quite so abuzz with interest, Wen decided, standing at the back of the little group and watching as the Boss’s workmen finished securing the new specimen into the scaffold for survey and analysis. What it was, no-one was really sure – one of the Shahr-Pieni Reclaimers had found it, and there’d been enough interest for the Boss to actually send some big-rigs down there and fly it all the way back to Sostine, several thousand miles to the North, to see if they could find a way to replicate it and turn it into a profit.

     Right now, its potential for profit making looked… unlikely. Slim at best. It probably didn’t help that it was filthy, to begin with, covered in black silt from its trip through the sewer, and smeared with all manner of gunk from the Dump. Its colouring wasn’t especially attractive, either – clashing shades of blue and yellow, on a grimy whitish base. And right now, it looked broken; it was only remaining upright because the workers had fastened it with a variety of chains and posts into a hastily-built scaffold. Its head slumped forwards, forehead resting against one of the scaffolding crosspieces, lips open very slightly; one of the workers had reported warm air coming out between them from inside the whateveritwas, so presumably it was a clever way of concealing the thing’s exhaust.

     Of course, the children were far less reticent to go and investigate than the adults; where the adult merchandise hung back, warily, the infants romped forwards as soon as the workmen had left in the lift, and were swarming over the doll / statue / whatever in seconds. Some (including Davren, now there was a surprise, or not) had climbed all the way up to its shoulders; their mother looked tired and dispirited (and untidy, so maybe she’d had a visit from the workmen herself?) and didn’t bother calling them back down.

     “Any ideas what it is, then?”

     “Hm?” Wen glanced sidelong at her friend; Glura, the little ‘enhanced ruta’ still living in the complex while she waited for her buyer to pay off his debt, had her ears perked forwards and her scales all coloured up an interested gold-green. “What makes you think I know? I’ve seen as much of it as you have.”

     “I know, but you’ve been here longest. The workmen talk to you. They may have said something!”

     Wen shook her head. “I don’t think they know, to be honest. It’s just… a… thing, I suppose. A doll, maybe. Some sort of big remote-control showpiece for the rich medusi, living in their expensive penthouses up on the surface.”

     Glura chuckled. “I heard they think it’s alive. Or at least, there’s something alive inside it. Like… it’s all some big suit for a tiny tiny wee creature that crash-landed here.” She held up her spindly thumb and forefinger a few microns apart, as if to demonstrate what she meant by tiny.

     “See! You know more than me, you sneak.” Wen laughed and gave her a friendly shove.

     Glura rippled colours over her crest and skipped out of the way, churrrr-ing in an amused, mock-warning sort of way.

     The adults gradually filtered away, as the minutes ticked past and the new arrival failed to live up to its exciting promise by just… sitting there, inert. Maybe it was just a big doll. Wen hung around, keeping an eye on the children; at least half of the mixed-species rabble had been “born” in test tubes, and as such seemed to view any of the adults – including those who had no children at all of their own, like herself – as viable “parental figures”.

     The fact that there were little gaps between joints in the big device gave Wen some degree of cause for concern, especially as the gaps were big enough for little hands to get in through. What if it suddenly activated and they got crushed?

     The children didn’t seem especially concerned; a little group of umi had found a bundle of glittery cables close to the surface and were attempting to winkle them out, for something bright to play with.

0o0o0o0o0
     Ow! Another spike of uncomfortable and inescapable feedback shot up Celerity’s back. Goodness this was getting fairly intolerable, especially given that she wasn’t able to get away from it.

     It was all… very uncomfortable… and most humiliating! The cluster of juvenile biologicals seemed to be trying to pry a hole large enough in her to get inside her – that they’d never succeed at it was beside the point, because they were – ow! – poking quite enthusiastically at her with a piece of metal. And that was ignoring the little troublemaker on her shoulder, picking at the fraying mess of wires spreading out from around the base of one of her antennae, where her positioning array had been damaged.

     She laughed inwardly at the irony of it, miserably. She didn’t want her location beacons disconnected, but someone had managed to sever them anyway; Firewire didn’t want to be found, but hadn’t managed to do the same. How ridiculous.

     Need to get out of here, girl, she told herself, decisively. Find a radio at very least. Comm Seem and let him know you’re ok, you’ll find him later.

0o0o0o0o0
     The blank grey eyes above her flickered, very briefly. Wen cocked her head, wondering if she’d been seeing things – maybe just light reflecting off the shiny surface? She squinted, concentrated… just visible behind the sheet of crystal were what looked like irises – lots of interleaving pieces of thin metal. As she watched, they… twitched? Perhaps attempting to focus. There was that same odd blue flicker, right in the very back of the socket, too – no, not just a flicker, a steady glow, now. She got the distinct impression that it – she? – the device or doll or creature or whatever it was… was looking at her. Maybe ought to call the children away…

     “Come on, little ones,” she called. “Down off there now, please.”

     “Mama said it was ok!” the boldest little male retorted, bravely.

     “I know she did, Davren, but Mama might not have realised that the lady might not want you climbing on her!”

     “What lady?”

     As if in direct response to the little een’s challenge, the giant figure creeeaked very softly, like stressed old machinery forced to operate after decades spent rusting; the grey eyes had filled with a strange, almost milky blue light, burning a slowly brighter azure as the seconds ticked past. Even Davren lost his nerve and hastily scrambled to the floor, trying not to squeak out loud in alarm as he fled to Wen’s side like a little white pompom and hid himself securely in her loose short-sleeves.

     For several long seconds, that was it. A series of uncomfortable creaks, and nothing more. At long last, the creature finally did more than just groan like old, stressed metal; with a degree of effort that looked painful, it finally managed to succeed in lifting its head off the cross-bar that supported it.

     “Um… hello!” Wen greeted, hoping it’d understand. It focussed very clearly on her, and there was a split second of oh lord now I die… before the big face softened into a tired, difficult smile.

     “Thaaank-… youuu,” the creature managed; its? No, her. Her voice was a deep, clunking shiver of broken static, like distorted voices from very far away, but the words came through well enough to understand.

     Wen smiled, reassured by the politeness. “You’re welcome…”

0o0o0o0o0
     Celerity watched as the small, beaky alien closed the gap between them, wondering what she wanted and hoping quietly that she’d be able to get some information on where exactly she’d wound up from her. It didn’t look like where she last remembered being – the sun was following a different angle in the sky, which suggested she was further north than she remembered being… which worried her.

     “Are you well?” the little female wondered, in the silence.

     “…don’t… knooow.” It was a laborious process just to get a few words out; she felt like screaming, frustrated. Patience, Lara, patience, she scolded herself. It’ll fix itself in time. Just give things a chance to reboot. If you’re still crawling in the murk this time tomorrow, then you can fret over it.

     “Could we help you?” The alien female changed her tactic. “Was it anything we did that hurt you?”

     “No… ahmmmsorry,” Celerity creaked out, in a whistle of dead air. “Stiihll… sick.”

     “Is there anything we can do for you?”

     The big femme smiled, sadly. “…nnno. Just-… jussst haave-… have to recaaaali- calibrate.” She winced, annoyed at her own inability to convey any idea of what was wrong with her, and forced a reboot of her vocaliser. It didn’t make things much smoother, because without her lips to soften and modify them, the words were still jagged and distorted, but at least they were coming out a little less slowly. “Sorry. Takes a while to, ah, khn… recover from a shock like that. Disturbs, unbalances everything inside.”

     “Take your time.” A little smile. “I don’t think you’ll be rushing off anywhere for a while.”

     Celerity examined her arms, and the heavy cages of scaffolding that had been erected around her to keep her from falling on anyone, and shook her head in agreement. “Probably not.” It didn’t look intentionally aggressive, admittedly, but that didn’t seem to count for much, given that regardless of intention, she still couldn’t actually move. “My name is Celerity – or just Lara, if that’s easier. What is your name?” Her voice, she was relieved to notice, was slowly easing into something more normal, as she regained control over her lips.

     “Me? My name is Wen. At least, that’s what everyone calls me, because my full name is a mouthful.” The female touched her long fingers to her chest. “And this,” she patted a hand on the white thistledown still hiding under her arm, “is Davren. By far the boldest of our little clutch of juveniles.”

     Celerity gave him a smile, and watched as he waved back – wide eyed, wiggling his fingers, shyly. “Reminds me a little of my nephew.” Or at least, how he used to be. When he still had that strange, shy, mischievous sense of curiosity about him, and wasn’t driven solely by a need to patch what he considered to be his father’s shortcomings. “Speaking of whom... is there any chance I could borrow a communications array? My inbuilt communicator is damaged, and I need to speak to him, tell him I’m ok.”

     Wen’s smile slipped askew, a little. “That… might be difficult, down here. We’re not entitled to those sorts of things. You’d have to speak to the Boss, and I’m pretty sure I know what his answer would be.”

     Celerity tried to ignore the increasing alarm drawing cold fingers up her back. “Beg pardon, but where is ‘here’?”

     “Here? ‘Here’ is the Nuori-Deuchainn laboratory ‘Pit’. Where all the Merchandise lives, while it’s waiting to be sold.”

     Yes, Celerity decided, the sense of alarm was well-founded.

     “They keep their Genebanks down here, too – like me,” Wen continued. “I’m just a mobile source of fancy genes. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if you’re a useful specimen, that’s probably all you’ll be, too...”

0o0o0o0o0
     The first thing Slipstream became aware of, as his body crawled reluctantly back towards wakefulness (and immediately wished it had chosen not to, for a little longer) was hurt.

     And augh dammit, it was bad hurts. Long, achey, exhausted hurts. What was I doing before I collapsed?

     -Memory: inaccessible. Please wait, rebooting.-

     His ‘vision’ as his optics came back online was pretty meaningless – mostly static, and mostly dark static, at that. He rebooted his optics, automatically, but it didn’t get much better – now it lacked a proportion of the static, sure, fine, but it was still just dark, anyway.

     If his tactile reception was anything to go by, the dark came from the fact that his nose was thrust into the dirt of a silt-covered floor in a dingy room, presumably underground somewhere. He lay on his front, face in the dirt, arms pulled up behind him. Great. More dirt. He went to push himself up, automatically, but his arms failed to respond – or at least, failed to come forwards. He made a noise of dismay, tried to push himself up with his feet instead… no, that wasn’t working, either. His legs seemed to be trapped in a fairly severe bend from the knee downwards-

     At last his memory became accessible, and he recalled that there’d been that… that creature, in the tunnels. No, not singular – creatures, plural. People. Guns. EM-grenade.

     And as soon as the “people” connection was made, the reason for his inability to move also became obvious. Prisoner. They’d knocked him out in the tunnel – slag, what had happened to Mirii? Alarmed, he managed to shift himself a tiny bit – enough to work out a little bit of what was going on. The reason he couldn’t get his arms forwards was probably something to do with the chain he could hear jingling quietly in the background – and it jingled more when he tried to move. Damnit.

     The chains were in just the wrong place for him to get his strength behind them – but even had they not been, there was probably too much chain there for him to break in the first place. It trapped his arms behind his back, and his lower leg against his thigh – so he couldn’t manipulate anything, and couldn’t stand either. Fantastic.

     His vision finally came into focus staring at a pair of feet, a hand-span or two away from his nose. Large, flat feet, each toe tipped with a dirty, chipped claw, slowly drumming out an irritable tempo against the dirty ground.

     He followed the leg upwards with difficulty, thanks to his position; loose trousers – good, it was ‘people’, he could try talk to it – a chain-mail belt with a leather-wrapped knife jammed under it, and an open leather jacket that demonstrated the pale scars across the thing’s chest. It had a haughty, flat face with a sneering nose and chipped teeth, and Slipstream felt instantly like the it saw him as the dirt it had to scrape from beneath its toenails. He managed to squirm and throw his way into a better position for making eye-contact with it, half propped on the wall.

     “You finally decided to join us, then,” it said, at last. Male, young. Aggressive.

     “Maybe if you hadn’t attacked me, I’d have been awake quicker,” Slipstream sniped, glaring.

     The creature didn’t seem to like his tone of voice, flicking him lightly across the face with a short length of leather-wrapped cable; a flicker of electricity grounded across his face, involuntarily contorting his features. “You don’t get to be snippy with me,” he snapped. “You’re lucky we’re giving you the chance to talk. Why are you here?”

     Slipstream hunched his shoulders, as best he could, and dropped his tone to a snarl of boots on gravel. “None of your business.”

     Another blow from the weapon, harder this time, on his shoulder. “Take that tone with me again, and we’ll take the persuasion up a step,” the male advised, sharply, while the mech growled and struggled to get his arm to relax again. “Why are you here? It’s an easy question.”

     “Why do you want to know?”

     “Why are you so set against telling me? Scared your target might get wind of it?”

     Slipstream narrowed his eyes. “What would you know about my target? Who says I even have one?”

     “Oh, I know plenty. I know it’s not like this is the first time you’ve come after them with murder on your mind.” The aggressor lifted his chin, and folded his arms. “That why they sent you down here this time?”

     “No one sent me-”

     “Oh! A vigilante, huh? Out to claim a reward, or just improve your own personal situation? I didn’t know machines were even capable of it.” The alien lowered his voice to a growl of threat. “Listen. You should know the soughs are our territory,” he growled, pacing. “I dunno, maybe they failed to program that in when they were teaching you how to kill us. Maybe they didn’t care.”

     Slipstream glared up at him. “I don’t even know what a suff is,” he retorted. “And I have far better things to do with my time than run around killing useless squishy little bits of wet flesh like you-”

     The weapon came down hard across his face before he’d even finished speaking, and delivered an excruciating jolt of electricity. The youngling jerked and mewled in pain and arched his back, involuntarily.

     “Don’t you lie to me!”

     “I’m not lying!” Slipstream gasped the words out, staring up at the dirty, broken ceiling and trying to get his fans to run down; they were huffing like a breathless old heart patient already, and he wasn’t even that hot inside. He wasn’t letting himself look too closely at the idea that he was scared by this stupid bit of squish.

     “So explain it to me! If not to kill us, what are you here for?” the creature demanded, his voice chilly. “Take prisoners, make arrests for that joke of a court up on the surface? Harvest us for our goddamned organs, like the last time you lot hit us?”

     “It’s nothing to do with you lot, and it’s none of your busin-”

     Crack. Motor spasm, pain.

     “Wrong answer. What are you here for,” the creature repeated, flatly.

     “All right all right I’m looking for someone,” Slipstream ground the words out, trying to ignore the pain. “I’m just looking for someone.”

     “Looking for someone?” the creature challenged. “Looking for Rasa, is that it?”

     “I don’t know what a rasa is!” Slipstream argued, voice rising. He knew the alien was going to hit him again before he’d even lifted his arm, but cringing away from it didn’t do anything to protect him from it. “I’m here looking for Lara, not a rasa!” he squealed, curling away from the pain. “Lara’s my aunt-”

     Pain cracked across his face. “You’re a machine! What do you take me for, a moron?” The words were hard to pick out of the crackling distortions the short circuit left in its wake. “Machines don’t have aunts! You have builders, and programmers, not parents and sisters!”

     Sisters. The word was like a meathook in his main pump. Firewire had got there before them. Was even now watching and laughing while his new allies punished the little brat who’d dared to have the audacity to try and help his sister. “Please, I don’t mean you any harm, I don’t mean you any harm…! I’m looking for my-” Not aunt, that’ll make him angry, what else? “-my friend!”

     “So you can hurt us! Kidnap our leader, steal her away to be punished for nothing!”

     “I’m a police officer, I work for the good of society, I wouldn’t do anything to hurt anyone!”

     He wasn’t sure how, but that had apparently been the wrong thing to say. The alien flew at him, incensed – delivered a flurry of crackling painful short-circuiting blows across his head and shoulders until the pain finally tore the sobs from his vocaliser.

     “You dare mock me, machine?” the alien panted, out of breath, in a lull in the beating.

     “…not mean… to mock…” Forcing coherent words out of his vocaliser was almost impossible, Slipstream found. Something had shorted out altogether; his nanites were in a frenzy, trying to reroute power away so they could repair it. His optics were malfunctioning, too, overflowing with excess cleanser; he tried to turn off the pumps, but they wouldn’t deactivate.

     “So what did you mean to do?” The alien crouched next to him, using one antenna as a handle to force the mech to maintain eye contact. “Hmm? Come on. Explain it to me. You’re police. You admitted it yourself. And now you want me to also believe that you’re all sweetness and innocence? Some… noble, honourable instrument of death?”

     Slipstream managed to nod. “Not here… to hurt anyone,” he repeated.

     Another unexpected impact clipped sternly around his antennae, fizzing painful static into his cortex.

     “When you stop taking the piss,” the male hissed, softly, “and stop lying to me… then life will get a whole lot more comfortable. Keep on lying, and, well… we’ve got a lovely mainframe in the system hub, through that door. I’d hate for us to have to take you to pieces and rig you into it to get the information we want out of you…”

33299 / 80000 words. 42% done!