Not because it’s easy.
But because this baby is the last piece of a story I didn’t get to finish.
And I’ll be damned if I let it end in silence.
CHAPTER 14
GAROKK
Icome back to myself on a bed of hot metal and old dust.
The lights are red—only red—strobing like an angry heart. Everything tastes like iron and burnt plastic. My throat is a furnace; when I try to swallow, something sharp bites the back of my tongue and I hiss. Pain blooms along my left arm like someone is carving a map into me. My skin prickles where the scales are singed raw, and beneath the ribs a phantom ache keeps time with a heartbeat I do not recognize.
I do not know what a day is. I do not know if the sun still has a sun. I know only that my lungs want more air than they get and the room smells like the inside of a machine that has coughed up its bones.
“Hey.”
The voice is wrong. Metallic. Small. Tentative. Familiar only because the sound pattern matches memories of comfort and annoyance and light that I once thought I could live without.
“Get—” I try to say it, but it comes out as a rasp and a curse. My mouth is lead. The word fractures.
“Easy,” the voice says. “Easy, Garokk. You are alive.”
Reflector’s voice—mangled, rewired, scraping the edges of its original timbre—sputters from somewhere over my shoulder.He looks like a bird that’s been put back together by a mechanic who hates birds. His shell is scorched; one optic is a raw circle of glass, the other blinks weakly like a dying star. His manipulators are frayed and jury-rigged with bits of insulation and a strip of red holo-tape that reads: PROPERTY OF IZZY D. He’s patched himself into an emergency terminal, cradled against a downed conduit, and he is doing that stupid little orbit he always does when he’s nervous.
“Reflector,” I gasp. “What are you doing here? You should be protecting Isolde.”
“I am,” Reflector says.
“Reflector…I’m looking right at you. Are your circuits that sizzled?”
“Allow me to explain,” Reflector says. “The quantum field that permeates reality and keeps it functioning with what passes for stability from your perceptions was weakened when the Hulk’s superluminal drive sent a soft ‘pulse’ of Norven-Radd radiation, a pulse that is more aptly referred to as…”
He loses me completely. I studied superluminal drives during my basic training--all recruits are required to learn about the tech that keeps us alive and mobile--but he starts spouting physics that’s beyond my pay grade. I do manage to translate some of it, though.
“...which resulted in a quantumly-entangled duplicate of both my artificial intelligence matrix and my physical casing, resulting in my being, for all intents and purposes, in two places at once.”
He sits quietly for a moment, then--
“Did you understand all of that, Garokk?”
“Of course I did,” I snap. “You’re not dealing with just any moron! There are two of you now, right?”
“Not precisely. It would be more accurate to say that my consciousness has been temporarily--”
“I’m going to run with the idea that there’s two of you, one with Isolde and one with me, to preserve my sanity.”
“As you like, Mr. Garokk,” he replies, seeming somewhat disappointed. I think the bot likes to ramble and sound smart. Well, there’s plenty of organic beings with that same idea. The only problem is his vocal output is way too high for the head-hammering migraine I have right now.
“You’re going to need to be quieter than that,” I croak. My voice is foreign—low and rough, like stones grinding. “Which deck is this?”
Reflector buzzes, pulls a little closer and I taste the singe of his inner processors—hot smoke and the metallic sweetness of displaced circuitry. “You were flung to emergency deck four when the surge hit,” he says. “I—I dragged you into an air pocket. You were unresponsive for—data corrupted—estimation: three days. Possibly longer. The mainframe—” He twitches. “The ship’s AI core is critical. Many subsystems failed. Propulsion remains. We are adrift.”
Adrift. I pull that word up like a hook and feel the cold of it bite my palm.
“Where—where is the Hulk?” I ask. My tongue is heavy. My thoughts are clay.
Reflector's optic shutters click. “Currently—location unknown. Local sensor net is offline. However, external thrusters are active. We are—” Another sputter. “We have entered the Badlands, Garokk.”
