Heart of Steel (13 page)

Jim continued.

Finally Mechanus’s concussed mind found and blindly triggered a likely-looking function. The pain vanished, but his right arm still hung uselessly by his side. With his remaining arm, Mechanus aimed the

Stormcaller at the center of Jim’s chest and wordlessly fired. A deafening thunderclap filled the narrow hallway as a bolt of blue-white lightning leapt from the Stormcaller’s muzzle and slammed into Jim.

Jim’s muscles went rigid, sending his spine into a spasmodic bow and his arms almost straight back. His mouth opened wide in a silent scream, and Mechanus could almost visualize what sort of merry hell a few million volts of electricity were causing in his augmented nervous system.

Finally the muscle spasms ceased, and Jim staggered away from him, smoking and disoriented, offering a bit of breathing room. Mechanus took aim again, and—

Something slipped in Mechanus’s mind, and the laceration in his arm started to burn with pain again. The vision in his mechanical eye flickered on briefly, trying to regain full functionality, but this only exacerbated his disorientation.

“No,” he whispered aloud, and reached for the pain-cancelling function again. To his horror, he couldn’t readily find it. If Jim came at him again, the likelihood of the function slipping entirely was high—and with it went any chance he had to concentrate on a further mental assault.

He was dimly aware of a metallic hiss behind him.

“Get in here!” Julia shouted, and he obliged, backing up blindly. It was all he could do, really, because a few seconds after the door shut the pain-cancellation function slipped entirely, and the agony

drove him to one knee, dropping the Stormcaller with a clatter. Through a red haze he saw Julia crouch in front of him, heard her asking him questions in a voice that seemed to come from roughly the far side of the Milky Way, and felt her examine his wounded arm with gentle, capable fingers.

A few seconds later, the static cleared in his mechanical eye, and he fumbled for his internal diagnostic subroutines. While they ran, he remained still, just watching her.

“Shit,” she said, “That’s going to need stitches.” Her head jerked up as another metallic impact thundered against the door, and he saw her expression suddenly galvanize. The fear he’d seen since collecting her from her room—in fact, that she’d seemed to wear to a greater or lesser extent since coming to Shark Reef Isle—suddenly vanished, replaced by a look of determined concentration. “Squeaker. We need to stop the bleeding. Compress. Now.”

He heard an answering chirp from the maintenance robot that he was sure had no name, and its little legs chattered against the floor as it scuttled off.

“Stickman,” she continued, “Find me a pair of gloves.” She searched around her waistband and pulled out a bottle of antiseptic spray and a suture kit. So that’s where those had gone.

“By your command,” buzzed the spindly robot that she had clearly dubbed Stickman.

Mechanus had already determined that the laceration in his arm was deep, though not quite to the bone. What concerned him was the damage to his facial implants, as his eye seemed to still be malfunc-

tioning, and his internal subroutines were responding sluggishly to his commands.

Julia leaned in to his face, turning his head to the right and inspecting his mechanical eye.

“Looks like the lens is cracked,” she reported. “And I can’t tell, but the plates here might be dented. Jesus—what could have done that? I need someone in here who has a better idea about this.” Squeaker chirped near her hip. She glanced down. Mechanus followed her gaze and saw the little maintenance robot bore a folded bundle of clean cloth.

“Good boy,” she said. “Hang onto that for a minute.”

“Miss Julia?” Stickman buzzed from her other side. “Your gloves.”

She took a pair of blue latex gloves from him and pulled them on with practiced ease. Another slam thundered through the door. Julia glanced over her shoulder, biting her lip, but dissected his blood-soaked sleeve with practiced snips of the surgical scissors and inspected the gash. She took the bundle of cloth from Squeaker and pressed it against the wound.

It hurt.

A lot.

The breath froze in his lungs, and he bit back a groan.

“Keep breathing, Alistair,” she said softly. “I know this hurts.”

He managed a nod and forced himself to inhale and exhale like he knew his lungs still knew how to do. His breath came in tight gasps, but it would have to do.

“Squeaker,” she continued, “Hold this here. Press down as hard as you can.” The maintenance robot

scrambled its way up his arm, under the tatters of cloth, and gripped his upper arm hard, securing the compress and triggering another burst of pain. “Stick-man, we’re going to have to move him somewhere more secure.”

“I believe Scarface is converging on this location,” Stickman informed them.

As if on cue, a roar like the wrath of a sea god came from the other side of the door. Scarface had arrived.

Mechanus smiled through the pain and disorientation. Good boy.

“We need to go,” Julia snapped. “Now. Help me get him to his feet. Alistair, do you think you can walk?”

Everything was happening so fast. He heard the words but couldn’t quite comprehend what they meant.

“Hey.” Her voice was softer now, gentler, and distantly he felt her hand against the right side of his face, calming, comforting, soothing. He focused on her face as the vision in his mechanical eye flickered again. “Can you hear me?”

He managed a nod, and then turned his full attention on his mechanical legs. He was still light-headed, and grayness was intruding at the edges of his vision, but he found no damage to his legs. This was good.

Stand up
, he thought, the command directed as much to his legs as to the rest of his being. He didn’t move immediately. Nearby, pandemonium continued on the other side of the blast door. He hoped Scarface was all right.

Stand up
, he commanded himself again. His legs flexed, but the motion was sluggish and jerky, as

though the joints needed lubrication. He stared at Julia, pushing aside all other sensory input—the howls of pain through the blast door, the way the remainder of his blood-soaked sleeve clung to his arm, the tight grip of the maintenance robot holding a compress to his laceration, even the pain of his beating—and anchoring himself mentally to her.

Stand. The
fuck
. Up.
True profanity was as foreign to him as emotions had been, but somehow the primal, Anglo-Saxon word galvanized him, focused his mind, and drove the servos in his legs, hauling him slowly, inevitably to his feet. Another wave of dizziness threatened to make him black out, but he kept his eyes on Julia as he wobbled.

“Stickman,” she said, “Get under his arm.”

Several spindly metal appendages wrapped around Mechanus’s torso on the left side, and Stickman guided Mechanus’s metal arm over what served as its shoulders, supporting him.

“Where can I find someone who can repair his cybernetics?” she asked.

“The nearest such facility is in Laboratory 26,” Stickman replied. “This way.”

“Lead on,” she said, and added, “You’re going to be okay, Alistair. We’re going to find some help.”

As Stickman half-led, half-carried him into the next corridor, Mechanus’s concussed brain swirled with questions in a broth of astonishment. How had the frightened woman he’d been trying to charm suddenly turned into this fearless healer? When had she started naming his robots, most of whom he’d identified by their function rather than as individuals?

He clung grimly to consciousness, not wanting to risk not waking up, but clearly his mind had other ideas. Without warning, he was—

—waking up atop the crisp sterile sheets of a hospital bed, his nose assaulted by the smell of antiseptic   creams,  disinfectants,  and   saline.  His

mouth is dry and leathery, and his throat is agonizingly painful. The only thing he can move is his head and his right arm, and he can’t see anything to his left, though he feels linen bandages covering that side of his face. Another smell, subtler, reaches his nostrils, and it seems at first to be incongruous in the setting: the fragrance of cooked bacon. The next thought is the sickening realization that he is smelling
himself
, as he recalls that burning human flesh smells strongly like cooking pork.

He gags—and that’s when the rest of the pain comes, distant and dulled by the fog of morphine but not entirely eliminated, the pain that comes from having one’s epidermis thoroughly carbonized and then surgically peeled away. His throat spasms in protest, and he tries to call out for help, but he is only able to make a thin rasping sound; his vocal cords are ruined.

He turns his head and locates his right arm in his peripheral vision with the IV line taped at the crook of his elbow and the pulse oximeter clipped to the tip of his index finger. Nearby is a nurse call button. Beyond this, he sees a collection of medical monitoring devices, one of which beeps regularly with his pulse. He uses his thumb to pull his hand towards the call button, intending to ask how long he’d been there and what happened to the passenger in the car with him.

It is surprisingly hard work, and the rhythm of the EKG accelerates as he fights off frustration.

A doctor enters in a clean white lab coat and makes his way around to within his field of vision.

Good morning,
he says.
How are you feeling today?

He looks at the doctor numbly for a few seconds, too drugged to say anything relevant.

He is informed that he has been in the hospital for a week. He is informed that he is lucky to be alive, but clearly he is a fighter. He is informed that his left arm and both legs had to be amputated, and he suffered third degree burns over half of what was left. He lost his left eye. He is informed that the surgeons did what they could, and of course there are options available to him.

He tries to ask again about her, but his throat still won’t cooperate, and instead he can only mouth her name, over and over like a mantra, as he descends again into a morphine haze...

Chapter

ELEVEN

Julia couldn’t allow herself to stop, not even for a minute—because stopping meant she would have to think about what was happening. Cruising on autopilot right now was much better. Once they’d arrived in Laboratory 26, she noticed that while Mechanus was still walking around, he had that blank stare that told her he’d checked out again. She waved her hand slowly in front of his face, but he didn’t react.

Damn.

“Get him over to that bed,” she said to Stickman. The spindly robot led him over, and he followed in a daze, sitting obediently when Stickman pushed down on his shoulders. She relaxed marginally; at least she didn’t have to manage however much dead weight he would have represented.

Depending on how much of him was metal, this could easily be several hundred pounds.

Once Alistair was lying on the bed, she turned all her attention to his injured arm, lifting it so she could cut off the ruined sleeve entirely. After the blood-soaked fabric was out of the way, she lowered his arm, moved Squeaker off the compress and pulled up one corner to see if the bleeding had stopped. It had slowed, at least, which was good.

“I need soap and warm water to clean this,” she said. Seconds later, another robot approached with a basin of soapy water and a cloth.

While she washed the gash, spindly robot arms descended from the ceiling and started working on the damaged plates in Mechanus’s face, carefully easing away the scratched and dented metal in order to repair the inner workings beneath. She tried not to look—not because she was squeamish, but rather because it was an uncanny reminder of how
not human
he was. For good measure, she sprayed the open gash with antiseptic.

A spark flew from one of the styluses attending to things, and Mechanus twitched. He made no sounds of pain or discomfort, not even when she finished rinsing the gash and started suturing it. His eye was open, the pupil dilated, his expression blank. He was lost in whatever flashback now consumed him. This one didn’t seem to be as traumatic as the last one, so overall it seemed to be a better place for his mind to be, away from the pain.

Not everyone had that luxury, in her line of work.

She finished suturing the gash closed—mentally estimating that he wouldn’t have too bad of a scar when it healed, compared with all the others she’d seen on him—and sprayed the sutured area with anti-

septic a second time. She was about to bandage his arm when she noticed his lips were moving faint-ly, mouthing something over and over again. She frowned, straining to listen, and finally leaned in close, placing her ear close to his mouth.

“Lauren,” he whispered, barely audible even now. “Lauren... Lauren...”

A chill ran down her spine. The amount of longing in his voice as he said the name was utterly heartbreaking, as though Lauren—whoever she was—had once been his entire world.

She jerked herself upright, suddenly wanting to get away from that longing. Clearly Lauren was gone now, but...

But what?

But as the ministrations of the repair robots on his cybernetics reminded her so acutely that he was a machine, hearing him calling out the name of someone he apparently lost long ago reminded her, just as acutely, that he used to be human.

That, in many ways, he still
was
human.

She watched as one of the utility arms surgically detached his damaged mechanical eye from its metal socket, and her stomach clenched again. She returned her attention to bandaging his wounded arm, studiously not watching as the replacement was brought in and, with just as much precision, connected and set into the socket. She had no idea if he would have felt any pain during this procedure.

A new sound invaded her thoughts as she worked.

k-CHAK.

She jumped, and as her eyes involuntarily sought out the origin of the sound she saw fresh plates, shiny and undamaged, being lined up and fastened into

place with the staccato retort of a rivet gun being fired.

k-CHAK.

k-CHAK.

k-CHAK.

And his vacant stare continued, only now the angle of his head made it seem like he was staring at her. The utility arms moved away at last, and his mechanical eye activated and focused with a small whirr, the light behind the metal iris glowing pale blue. His gaze was becoming uncomfortably intense, and she glanced away, finishing her task as quickly as she could.

Once the bandage was secured, she stripped off her gloves and instinctively glanced around for a sink so she could wash her hands. Finding one, she made a beeline for it, tossing her bloody gloves on the counter beside it. She glanced back once, and saw to her relief that his mismatched eyes had not followed her. She glanced over the rest of him, instinctively looking for any further injuries, and noticed that his lab coat hung loosely open at the hem, exposing his metal-clad legs to just above the knees. The longer she looked at them, however, the more they looked like flesh-and-blood limbs couldn’t possibly fit inside the sleek design. She didn’t know much about armor smithing, but the joints looked all wrong, too solid—like the knees of a very humanlike robot. His legs weren’t just metal-shod but
metal
, period. She had to grab the sink for balance as this fresh discovery sunk in.

He’s a cyborg, dear,
said the sensible voice.
You already knew he was a cyborg. Just calm down. This isn’t all that earth-shattering.

Okay,
she thought.
I’m okay. I’ll just leave those parts for the repair robots.

Her eyes were soon drawn back to the parts of him that she could actually handle, and she was gratified to see that he had no further serious injuries. His forearm and hand, however, were still smeared with drying blood, and she made a face. That was just
messy
, and she didn’t like to leave a mess if she could help it, especially after a procedure like this. It was a matter of professional pride.

She returned to her earlier position next to where he lay, sitting with the basin of soapy water but studiously facing away from that blank stare. How long was he going to be like that, anyway? She had no idea how long these flashbacks typically lasted for him.

She rinsed out the bloody sponge until the water she squeezed out no longer emerged red, and started washing the half-dried blood from his forearm and hand, working as slowly and methodically as she typically did when a medical emergency had passed. His arm was smooth and hairless, and corded with the sort of lean muscle that she wouldn’t have associated with a man of science (mad or otherwise). His hand was the most fascinating part, though—lightly callused, with long, slender fingers that she found herself associating with a pianist.

No, not a pianist.

A surgeon.

She remembered doing something like this when Jim was in the hospital, unable to get out of bed, let alone keep himself clean. It was true that doctors saw

you at your absolute worst in the hospital, and the Emergency Room took this notion and turned it up until the knob broke. Jim, though, had kept up his rel-

atively good cheer between the traction and the morphine. She’d visited him when he’d been moved to another department for long-term care, even though some nagging voice in the back of her head tried to tell her that this might violate some sort of medical code of conduct.

And after he’d been discharged, Jim had asked her for her phone number, and wouldn’t take no for an answer. He was so
charming
about it, and she was in need of a social life, so she gave in. The rest was history, as they say.

And now Jim was a deranged cyborg that wanted to kill them both. She saw the way Jim had looked at her, in the few seconds she’d seen him at the blast door, drooling blood, his jaw knocked askew in a way that suggested it was broken. From what Mechanus had told her, she’d expected a vacant, mindless, or at best a feral stare—but when their eyes had met, she’d seen something far more chilling: recognition.

He’d been completely aware of what he was doing, and he’d
recognized
her.

Her hands stopped their tender ministrations. Alistair’s arm was clean now, in any case.

Jim had recognized her. The thought kept spinning in her mind, demanding that she make sense of it.

When he’d first shown her the rebuilt Jim, Alistair had said that Jim had recognized her. She’d been too horrified at the time to give this much thought, and so much had happened shortly afterwards that she hadn’t given it much thought. Later on, Alistair had treated cyborg-Jim like just

another mindless tool in his arsenal of robots, another mental appendage to do his bidding.

Her stomach turned over, and she looked down at the slender hand that she now cradled in both of her own.

Alistair had also said that they were both connected to the network, so logically he would have
known
that Jim was still aware, that he was getting ready to do something horrible with enough warning to—

What could it have been like for Jim, being trapped in that reconstructed form, forced to do as Alistair bid him? He had to have been fighting it. He was stubborn like that. If Jim was fighting it, then Alistair had to have noticed, at least over the network, and—

Her throat closed.

He’d known. Alistair had
known
. There was no way he
couldn’t
have known.

He’d known that Jim was still aware, and he hadn’t seen fit to tell her about it. This was worse than the idea that Jim had been made into a mindless meat puppet—a thousand times worse—because it meant that it was at least partially Alistair’s fault that Jim was after them.

And she was just starting to trust him, too...

But Alistair had risked his life for her, facing off against Jim at the blast door.

Hadn’t he?

She knew the signs of disorientation when she saw them, as when he'd reported Arthur's absence, and it was clear that something had attacked him before he came to get her. She had no way of knowing how skilled an actor he was, but the gash in his arm, the nosebleed, and the torn lab coat were all absolutely real. Seeing him injured had triggered the same nurturing instinct in her that had led to her

becoming a doctor—that innate need she had to Make Things Better.

And now that she had time to think about things, the expression on his face when he mentioned Jim’s rampancy looked a lot like he’d concluded he’d made a terrible mistake. Not
Oops, I used the wrong fork during a formal dinner
so much as
I think I may have just engineered our probable deaths and now I have to fix it before bad things happen.

She glanced down at Alistair’s hand, clean now with a thoroughness that only medical habit could achieve, and lightly stroked his fingers. She didn’t know how she should feel about the current situation, though a lot of options came to mind.

Afraid
was the big one at the top of the list. Jim was on a murderous rampage that Alistair might have caused.
Frustrated
came next; all she’d wanted was a peaceful vacation, and then a relaxed life back home, freed from Jim’s control. Well, that wasn’t going to be an option now.
Worried
raised its head as well, now that she was taking stock of things. She was worried for herself, of course, but more than this she was worried about Alistair—this broken mad cyborg who’d thrown himself into the lion’s jaws for a woman he’d known less than a week, and now he was battered and torn up and unconscious because of her.

It wasn’t fair. None of it was fair. This shouldn’t be happening to her. She was supposed to be back home by now.

Tears stung her eyes. She sniffled and swiped them away with the back of her wrist. They weren’t tears of fear or frustration this time, she knew, but it took a few seconds for her to parse out what she was

feeling. It wasn’t something she’d allowed herself to feel for a while now, after all.

She was
angry
.

Angry about her situation, angry about Jim coming after her like this, but most of all angry—pissed off all to
hell
—at her conclusion that Alistair could have prevented this at any time, and instead had chosen to hide this potentially very
useful
information from her.

She instantly wanted to flinch away from the emotion, because Good Girls Didn’t Get Mad, but she fought the long-ingrained habit. Good girls didn’t get mad, but she clearly hadn’t accomplished a lot on Shark Reef Isle by shying away from things that happened to be scary.

She was done being afraid. She was done running away from things. Alistair might be out of commission, but Julia could still do something to help.

She couldn’t exactly stay mad at Alistair—whatever else he’d done or not done, he
had
tried to hold off Jim at the blast door and gotten badly injured as a result. Getting mad at him for that seemed petty. However, she
could
turn that energy to something useful, like finding Arthur.