Heart of Steel (10 page)

Jesus Christ. Were all his flashbacks going to be like this? If so, she was going to have to make sure to have preparations in place to handle the next one.

***

...Gah.

Of all the
damnable
times to have a flashback... but—

She stayed. She was the first thing he saw when his vision cleared, and he could have sworn he heard her voice while... while...

—pinned in the rumpled wreckage choking on the smell of gasoline fumes can’t move can’t feel my left arm what the hell happened to my legs PLEASE GOD GET HER OUT OF HERE—

He flinched from the fragment of memory, and looked at Julia again.

Thank you
didn’t even begin to cover it.

He glanced over at Arthur.

“Did you record that one?” he asked.

“Indeed I did, sir, per your instructions.” Arthur frowned. “This one was, as they say, a doozy.”

“You were screaming,” Julia put in.

“What was I screaming?” Mechanus asked.

“You were... screaming for someone to wake up. That the car was on fire and someone needed to get out.”

His artificial stomach executed a slow, sickening barrel roll. He closed his eye and swallowed hard to avoid disgracing himself. The image of the blonde woman, unconscious and buckled in next to him, was still seared into his mind’s eye.

“Did I happen to say her name?” he asked.

“You... called her Honey,” Julia offered.

He shook his head. That wasn’t right—he knew it instinctively. He might have called her ‘honey’ as a pet name, but...

“Thank you, anyway,” he said, straightening up and regretfully removing her hands from his face. he told Arthur. Out loud, he added to Julia, “Now—about that companion I made you...”

“Are you sure?” she asked. “You still look... I don’t know, kind of spooked.”

“I’ll be fine,” he said, though at that point he wasn’t sure how true it was. “We’ll discuss the details later, once the arrangements you requested are in place. Agreed?” He held out his hand to her.

She nodded and took it. She looked a bit spooked herself, but then again she said he’d been screaming during his flashback.

Well. Enough about that for now.

he asked.

Arthur informed him.

“He’s just up ahead,” he said to Julia.

“So... what sort of a companion is it?” she asked.

“A chimera of my own design,” he said. “I assure you, he is very gentle and intelligent, with no... er, hard edges to worry about.”

“Okay...?” she said, sounding uncertain.

“It’s all right,” he said, gently guiding her through the laboratory door—

—or trying to, as she did that stopping-short-without-warning thing again.

The chimera crouched in the middle of the room, having decided that hooves and knuckles offered the most comfortable posture as a compromise between the torso and arms of a lowlands gorilla and the head and hindquarters of a pony. He turned his head to look at Julia, ears alertly forward, and whickered a greeting.

Julia took a bit over a step back before she collided with Mechanus. He steadied her by the shoulders, suppressing a sigh of frustration at her lackluster reaction. He would
not
get annoyed over this. He refused. It would be counterproductive and

he’d only just started to make some progress with her. Getting upset now would only compound the setback. She wasn’t flinching away from Mechanus himself, though, which was
something
.

“It’s okay,” he reassured her. “He’s quite friendly—see? He wants to say hello.”

The horse-ape knuckled his way forward and extended one thick-fingered hand in wordless invitation to shake. Mechanus could feel Julia’s heart hammering in her ribcage where she pressed against him, but she extended her own hand as well. The horse-ape’s hand fairly swallowed her own, but he’d been trained well under Anubis’s tutelage, and he slowly, carefully, shook her hand.

Julia let out a shaky little laugh as the horse-ape released her.

“He’s...” she started, but fell silent.

“He’s your new companion,” Mechanus said. “He’ll keep you company while you’re in your room, and perform any task you request of him.”

“He’s... kind of cute,” she said finally.

The horse-ape whinnied and clapped his hands, mirroring Mechanus’s approximate internal triumphant reaction, which admittedly usually involved more thunder and lightning and manic laughter.

Success!

Arthur said.

Mechanus replied, still giddy.

Mechanus sighed.

Mechanus’s blood ran cold. he demanded.

Mechanus considered this at length. <...Damnation,> he concluded.

“Anubis,” he said. The jackal-man looked up alertly. “When Julia and her new pet are acquainted, take them back to her room. I have some urgent business to attend to.”

Julia paused in stroking the horse-ape’s nose and glanced over at him. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

He froze. How could he put this so as not to cause her undue worry? After all, it should be a simple enough matter to rewire Jim to be more docile, maybe give him a proper lobotomy...

“A bit of a snag with one of my creations, that’s all,” he said lightly. “I should be done in time to join you for dinner.”

She studied him for several seconds. Did she see something in his face that betrayed the lie? He couldn’t tell.

“Oh,” she said. “What did you have in mind for dinner, then?”

“Well, uh, just something formal for the two of us, really,” he replied, mentally rifling through the available possibilities. “You seemed to enjoy the sea bass, so I figured I’d build something around that… maybe dancing later, if you want.”

She pressed her lips together doubtfully.

He raised his eyebrow at her.

Finally she tilted her head. “I’m willing to give it a shot,” she said. “
After
we spend an hour or so working on unlocking your memories.”

He winced, but nodded.

Arthur prodded him.

“All right, but I really must attend to this other matter first.”

“Okay,” she said. “See you at dinner, then. And...” She glanced at the horse-ape. “Thanks for the... pony?”

The horse-ape shook his head with a snort, as if to say
I’m not a pony!

“The privilege was all mine,” Mechanus assured her. He had a dozen other things that he wanted to say to justify this statement, most of them on the theme of
That’s what you do to show you love someone
, but decided none of them would be up to par, so he shut his mouth and left, turning his mind to other things.

he instructed Arthur as he strode down the hallway.

Mechanus set his jaw, turning down a hallway leading to that sector.

Damnation
. Well, as long as the neural implants were still in place and functional, Jim wouldn’t be able to take any actions against Mechanus himself. Then a more chilling thought occurred to him: if the neural implants were functioning properly, the rampancy wouldn’t even be an issue.

That explained a lot, actually.

Mechanus instructed.

A chill ran down Mechanus’s spine.

Mechanus called, alarmed now.

A long silence, followed by a quiet transmission, almost a whisper:

For a long time all Mechanus heard was his own breathing and the frantic whirring of his cardiac pump. Even the carrier signal that marked Arthur’s presence was missing.

<...Arthur?> he transmitted.

Nothing.

This he sent across all channels, hoping that Arthur had just switched to another frequency for security purposes.

Mental silence answered him. Arthur had always been there, for the entire ten years that he could properly recall. He’d been a sanity anchor for Mechanus, as far as one could measure sanity in someone like him, being a valuable conversational partner and companion while he’d been building up Shark Reef Isle into a proper lair.

Arthur
not
being there was literally unthinkable, like missing part of one’s own brain.

<...Arthur?> he transmitted into the yawning void, a bare mental whimper.

The silence continued. Then:

Mechanus froze. That wasn’t Arthur’s voice.

he demanded.

Mechanus tentatively probed forward, and detected Jim’s brainwaves at the other end.

...Oh,
brimstone
.

Jim continued.

That was the only warning Mechanus got before he felt his own mind invaded and rifled. He was sure he screamed—whether in surprise or pain, was anyone’s guess. He forced the intrusion out, staggering to lean against a wall, breathing hard.

What an idiot he’d been! He didn’t have any internal security on the network, because the idea of someone intelligent and not affiliated with him being connected to it had been unthinkable. The physical security on his island was top notch, and any intruders would have been discovered and ejected, contained, or killed without delay.

He felt a tickling sensation on his lip and brushed at it reflexively. His fingertips came away red with blood. He wiped his nose on his sleeve, leaving a streak of crimson that stood out starkly against the white fabric.

“So,> Jim said, his voice still dangerously calm.

Well, that wasn’t
exactly
the case—seduction was a clumsy, brutish idea compared to what Mechanus had in mind, something that a cad would do—

Jim continued. mine
. No one else’s. You will never have her.
Never
.>

Anger—that new, frightening, and currently
completely   relevant
emotion—flared in Mechanus,

and he shoved back at Jim. <
You
listen to
me
, you ungrateful, artless, hell-hated miscreant—I am responsible for you even being
alive
right now, and I am making her happier right now than you ever could. You are repulsive to her now, and you will not stop her affection toward me, if that is her choice.>

Icy silence reigned over the link. Presently, Mechanus turned the last corner before the central control room. He stopped short as he saw the security door had been rent inward in a twisted chrysanthemum of metal. He trotted to a halt, hardly believing his eyes, and his throat threatened to close in panic.

Then Jim stepped into the irregular frame of the hole and glared directly at Mechanus. He possessed several new lacerations and burns, and in his utility claw he held a struggling security drone.

Jim said flatly. To punctuate his point, he crushed the security drone. Mechanus felt its last spike of dismay lance through his mind, and he flinched. Jim stepped through the rent door and tossed the drone aside. he reiterated.

Mechanus backed away a few steps, his mind racing. Arthur’s absence had left him disoriented, a condition further exacerbated by the revelation that Jim had slipped his leash and gone rampant. And now Jim—ostensibly Julia’s one-time boyfriend—seemed bent on killing her to keep Mechanus from having her.

This last fact focused Mechanus’s thoughts to a single point:
Protect Julia
.