Chapter 9
“Shit. Shit. Shit.”
“I can’t help but notice a certain level of familiarity between you and Jeffrey Peter Sloane.”
“That’s not his name,” Dawn muttered. “And our familiarity is none of your business.”
She ran a hand through her hair. What the fuck had just happened? She’d thought to keep tabs on the Hills spy, but instead, she was headed toward some sort of half-baked partnership.But I still have the upper hand. Don’t I?
“Yes,” she muttered to herself. “I do.” Hurrying to the security console next to the exterior door, she began initializing the highest level of security protocol. From the corner of her eye, she saw Ladee skate up to the station she’d built for him. It was lower to the ground and had miniature versions of much of the equipment she used in her own work.
A solemn beep informed her that the protocol was initiated. “There,” she said, dusting her hands together and sidling up to the robot. Its little black hands were wearing small white gloves, and he was slowly pulling on his tail, sliding his hands over the fur.
“What are you doing?”
Dropping his tail, Ladee smeared his finger over a glass slide he’d prepared, then into a series of Petri dishes lined up beside it. “I wanted to learn more about our guest,” he said. “So I came up with an unobtrusive way to take a biological sample. In my haste to inform you about the power, my tail ‘accidently’ brushed against him. I should have enough skin cells to perform a DNA analysis.”
“Ladee, you’re brilliant!” she said, bending to press a kiss to the creature’s forehead.
The robot gave her a wry expression, shook his head, and returned to work with a grumbled, “You programmed me.”
“Does this mean the whole power shutdown was a ruse so you could get close to him?”
“Afraid not,” the robot replied, carrying one of the dishes to the replicator. After activating the unit, he covered the remaining dishes and stored them within his locked sample case, the inside of which held a miniature stasis field to ensure preservation of the biological material. Then Ladee shoved the first slide underneath the microscope for a look.
Dawn rubbed her temples with the first two fingers of each hand. “I’ve got to start packing,” she mumbled. “We don’t have a chance of getting everything loaded before the air runs out.” Looking around the lab while mentally calculating the effort it would take to properly pack and move all her equipment, she let out a gasp when her eyes hit the sheet-covered shape.
“What am I going to do with my find? Without a secure location to store it—”
“It wasn’t an accident that he overheard my telling you about the power bill either,” Ladee said out of the corner of his mouth as he peered into the microscope. “He came to make an investment. It seemed like an opportunity we couldn’t miss.”
Dawn crossed her arms over her chest. “I hate that you’re smarter than me.”
The robot pulled away from his investigation and smirked at her. Then he padded over to the replication unit, pulling out the original sample and programming a request for multiple copies. Ladee took the original to the analysis unit, securing it before punching in his orders.
He sat down at the console she’d had sized for his nimble little fingers. “It’s going to take several hours, maybe a day, to fully analyze his DNA, but I can run the sample we’ve got through multiple databases without a full analysis.” The machine let out a buzz, and Ladee began hitting buttons on the console. “We have a preliminary scan. I’m running it through all of the databases I have access to in order to determine if there is a match.”
Dawn watched the screen as photos whirred past. It took several minutes, but finally, the photos disappeared, a line of text flashing instead. “No matches.”
“Well, he’s not a known criminal anyway,” the robot reported.
Feeling relieved, Dawn headed to her own console and pulled up her bank balance. “Nothing yet,” she reported. “Figures. Maybe he was bluffing about the five million credits.”
“I doubt it. He and his backers wouldn’t have gone through all the trouble of getting him inside here without being willing to pay to play. Their five million credits are buying almost unlimited surveillance and the docility of a female scientist bent on revenge.”
Dawn snorted. “Docility? They wish.”
“You’ll be so busy keeping an eye on the spy that you won’t be able to enact that little plan of sabotage you’ve been working on.”
She cocked an eyebrow at her companion. “You know about that, huh?”
Ladee shook his head at her in disappointment. “The last time the Hills created a military device based on one of your patents, their circuitry was hit by a mysterious bio-neural virus that burned out every linkage in their largest lab. They called it the ‘dysentery download’ because the frying circuits smelled like excrement.”
Dawn laughed. “Unfortunate, but in no way linked to me.”
Ladee rolled his eyes. “Quite a coincidence. And I saw the code you wrote for your new evil scheme to take revenge on your ex. Embedded in the master level is the repeating message ‘Brian is a douche.’”
“Okay, so I was angry,” she said, hands on her hips. “But I have to fight back how and when I can. And I was only planning to use it if they turned that tech toward dishonorable purposes.”
