Heart of Iron

  Robb couldn’t stay here anymore. In this stupid room. It was suffocating. And the corpse was staring at him. He tore out into the hallway, his eyes burning—

  There was movement behind him a moment before he heard the voice.

  “Halt,” it said.

  He gripped his lightsword tightly and turned toward two red-eyed Metals. They stood guard at the end of the corridor. His anger pulsed through him like white-hot magma. These Metals had killed his father. These heartless things.

  One of them raised a Metroid.

  With a furious cry, he lunged for the monsters as they opened fire.

  D09

  “Who’s there?” Ana called out, spinning around on the bridge that was not a bridge. She swung her pistol around the room to find somewhere to aim, but there was no one else here. “How do you know my name?”

  “I must know.”

  D09 inclined his head. The signal surrounded him, waves of commands attempting to sink into his mainframe, but he put up walls to block them. If he had not had a memory core, the program could have easily overriden him. He was 94 percent positive that was why the other Metals had attacked. They lacked the sentience to command themselves.

  But why had the Adviser created Metals that were not AI?

  The walls were seamless; the door they had entered by had disappeared. The corners of the room blended into one another, an endless expanse of white melting into the bright glow of the starshield. It tricked his optics, made colors that he knew were Ana dance and blur together. There were no readings on the starshield, no commands. But he could feel where the signal was strongest and turned to the center of the room.

  It grew louder the closer he stepped. The signal throbbed—scratching at his firewalls like white-hot talons. He had felt this sort of invasion before, just once, but much subtler.

  On Astoria.

  The signal cracked the walls he’d put up and wormed its way into his code. The counter he kept in the back of his head, the time until his next glitch, fluctuated under the stress of it.

  Two hours and thirty-seven seconds.

  Four hours and—

  Three minutes and thirty tw—

  Forty-seven seconds—

  He could not glitch now. It would put Ana in too much danger.

  Her golden-brown eyes darkened as she looked around the bridge. “Di, where is this thing?”

  “You wound me, Ana. I am not a thing.”

  She visibly tensed, spinning on her heels with her weapon ready—but there was nothing. There was nowhere to shoot. “We’re not here to hurt you,” she said, but her voice trembled all the same. She holstered her weapon and raised her hands. “See? We’re not. Are you a program like the HIVE? Did Rasovant create you?”

  “Did the Goddess create light?”

  The program breached his last wall. The foreign code threaded through his own, not disturbing or intrusive. Gentle. Prodding. Searching. “Ana, I believe it is not a program, but malware. And it is trying to hack me.”

  “Please tell me you’re joking.”

  He reassured her. “It is having difficulty.”

  “One-zero-one-one-one-zero-one—” It read off his data. “You are broken, brother. Your code is ruined.”

  Ana’s face pinched in pain. “That’s why we’re here to fix him.”

  “You have ruined him.”

  “I know!” she cried. But she had not ruined him. He wanted—tried—to say as much, but the program clamped down, suffocating him. “My crew—please, they don’t mean harm. Stop attacking them. We just want answers—”

  “You should have burned.”

  Her eyes widened. “. . . What?” she whispered.

  “Ana—” Di forced out, and the foreign codes in his processors seized. He made a noise, and the program dropped him to his knees. The counter in the back of his mind clicked to zero. He froze.

  Glitched.

  “He should have let you burn. And now he is ruined.”

  “Di!” Ana fell to her knees beside him, grabbing him by the shoulders. “Di, snap out of it—”

  He twitched, trying to override it, but the spikes of code disrupted him again and again. He could not stop it. The intruding numbers pulsed, breaking his data byte by byte. He was losing himself. What he knew. Information. Facts.

  Deteriorating.

  The program was breaking him.

  Trying to take control.

  No—

  It.

  Would.

  Not.

  “Stop it!” Ana cried. “Stop whatever you’re doing to him right now or I’ll shoot this whole place up until I find you!”

  “There will be others like him. They will be better. Do not fret.”

  “Like bloody hell they will!”

  The voice laughed. It would never let them escape, Di knew.

  The signal—it came from the center of the room.

  If the malware could sink into him, he could travel the same path. He could reach it, but he could not come back.

  “I’m getting you out of here,” she said, curling her arm into his. She tried to pull him up, to get him on his feet, but he was too heavy.

  She did not understand. They would not escape.

  In the signals, the wires, the pulses of white-hot talons that clawed into his code, he followed the malware’s trail. It was large—foreign. It had not had time to infest the entire ship, only the androids. He spread across its programs in zeroes and ones like the roots of a tree. He forced the console to reveal itself.

  A thin cylinder rose in the center of the room, a mass of mainframe and wires, and a hard drive at its center. Festering with the virus.

  “Di?” Ana asked as he drew himself away from her. Her voice was thick with worry. “Di—what’s happening? Did you do that?”

  “Stop struggling, brother. You are ruined. We will remake you.”

  “You are mistaken,” D09 said, willing himself to move, overriding protocols, breaking his own systems beyond repair. He staggered toward the console, not looking back at Ana, because if he did, he would recalculate his decision. “I am more than the sum of my parts.”

  “Di.” He registered her voice but could not look back. “What are you doing? Don’t—stop—come back!”

  He hesitated for a moment—long enough to realize there were no good good-byes.

  Then he shoved his hand into the console, wrapped his fingers around the hard drive, and pulled. The program retaliated, digging into his mainframe, clawing him apart. There was no pain.

  But the moment before he crushed the starship’s hard drive, not long enough by any quantifiable standards, he knew he would miss Ana.

  He would miss her more than iron and stars.

  Ana

  As Di’s moonlit eyes darkened, the shattered hard drive of the ship fell out of his ruined hand and plinked onto the floor like drops of hail.

  “You . . . will burrrr . . .” The voice grew distorted until it faded with a hiss of white noise as it died. And then nothing.

  For a moment, Ana didn’t realize what had happened, until the silence sank in.

  “Di . . . ,” she croaked, getting to her feet, and shuffled over to him. “I think it’s dead. I—I don’t hear gunshots anymore. Di?” She shook him, but he didn’t move.

  His eyes were dark. Dead like the bridge, hollow like the ship as it lost power, the lights above her flickering, flickering, then out, until only the light came from the emergency halogens, painting their shadows across the floor.

  “Di?” she asked again, shaking him harder. He moved then—or so she thought he did—but it was just gravity as his body fell over onto its side with a terrible thunk. “Wake up, you stupid metalhead!” Her eyes stung, searing with tears. “No—I didn’t mean to call you stupid. You’re not stupid. You’re my best friend. Please answer me, please . . . Di? Di?”

  She repeated his name, louder and louder, shaking him, but he was stiff, and dark, and cold. She screamed his name for so long, the wo
rd tore at her throat like daggers. He was just glitching.

  He would wake up. He had to. She would wait until he did.

  She hadn’t said good-bye.

  A figure appeared in the doorway. The captain. Hair as bright as sunshine.

  Ana turned her watery eyes up to her captain, rocking back and forth. It hurt to stay still. She was afraid that if she did, her sobs would shake her apart.

  “I’m sorry—I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Ana repeated, her words choking on each breath. “I’m sorry, please, let’s—please let’s do it again. I won’t—I won’t—won’t leave this time. I won’t—I won’t c-c-come here. . . .”

  The captain’s bloodred lips curved down as she knelt next to Ana. “C’mon, darling.”

  “We should wait—he’s just glitching. He’ll wake up. He’ll—he’ll come back—he always comes back. He . . . he . . .” Her voice wavered as the reality finally sank in. Her sobs grew louder until she could barely breathe. She pressed her face into her captain’s hair, which smelled like gunpowder and smoky cigars, and wailed.

  “Shhh,” the captain murmured, kissing her forehead. “We need to leave. The Metals are dead.”

  As Siege helped her to her feet, a great steel groan rumbled through the ship. The shards of the broken hard drive slid across the floor as the Tsarina tilted.

  “Captain—Captain! Can you read me?” Jax’s voice crackled through the comm-link.

  Siege responded. “Aye. I have Ana. What’s happening?”

  “Thank the Goddess. You need to get out of there. Now that the ship’s without power, it’s being pulled into Palavar’s orbit. We’ll be dragged down with it if we don’t disconnect. Is Robb with you?”

  “No, I haven’t seen him. We’re leaving.” The captain began to pull Ana with her, but she refused to move. “Darling, we have to go. Ana!”

  Ana snapped her eyes up to meet Siege’s green gaze.

  “I can’t carry you if I’m going to carry him, okay?”

  Him.

  Di.

  The captain wasn’t going to leave Di. Because he was going to wake up. They wouldn’t leave him to wake up alone.

  The captain grunted as she heaved D09’s frame over her shoulder. Di’s pistol lay abandoned in the corner of the room. The ship tilted farther, red emergency lights flaring on in the corners of the room, as she followed her captain out of the room—and paused.

  Turned back.

  She grabbed Di’s pistol, the barrel still warm, and took it with her, the sound of her heart beating in her ears when it should have broken on that bridge with the rest of her.

  Jax

  Grabbing an extra helmet from the rack in the cargo bay, he swirled his ponytail up into a bun and shoved it on. The air lock sighed and opened, bringing with it Riggs and Wick, carrying—

  “Goddess, Barger,” Jax gasped, staring at the lifeless body between his crewmates.

  A gaping hole was carved into the center of Barger’s back. Panic seized Jax’s insides and twisted, because he’d lost contact with that blasted Ironblood a few minutes ago. What if the Metals had shot him, too? What if he’d accidentally led the Ironblood straight into harm’s way? Goddess, he hated the Ironblood, but he hated the thought of him bleeding out somewhere alone even more.

  “Have you seen Robb?” he asked, trying to disguise his panic.

  Riggs shook his head. “Not since he ran off to go cut the power. You can’t possibly be going on the ship—it’s about to toss itself into Palavar.”

  “How can a ship toss itself?” Wick muttered, but Riggs waved him off.

  “You know what I meant—Jax!”

  But the Solani was already latching his helmet on to his suit. “Look, whatever awoke the ship is ninety-nine-point-for-sure coming after us, and the Ironblood’s not answering his fucking comm-link.”

  “Leave him,” Wick grunted, earning a sharp look from Riggs.

  “What about the ship? You’re the pilot,” said Riggs.

  “Wick, you can take the helm, yeah? ” Jax asked, and the Cercian nodded. “Good—if you don’t hear from me in five minutes, leave,” he added, stepping into the air lock.

  Great—he was even sounding desperate now. But he wasn’t. He simply wanted to look after his investment. Yes, that was it. He’d saved the Ironblood’s life once. He didn’t want that rich brat to die now.

  The door closed behind him and the air lock decompressed. He opened the outer door and grabbed onto the starbridge, hooking the safety strap onto his suit, and flicked the switch. Humming, the machine hauled him across the expanse toward the other ship.

  The Tsarina made him feel much smaller than he already did as he traveled across the line between the ships. His heart thumped louder against his rib cage the closer he got to the air lock, the only sound save for the voice in his head telling him that he shouldn’t get attached.

  You’ll regret it, the voice warned.

  It sounded suspiciously like his father’s.

  The zip line came to a stop with a whine, and Jax heaved himself into the Tsarina’s outer cargo air lock and closed the door behind him.

  The ship’s cargo bay looked like a war zone. Half a dozen Metals lay sparking on the ground; a trail of blood was smeared across the floor in front of the cargo-bay doors. Barger’s blood. He wondered, faintly, if Ironbloods bled the same, and the panic made him frenzied.

  “Lenda!” he called, taking off his helmet. The air in the Tsarina tasted like metal and dust. “Lenda! Where are you?”

  The blond woman peeked up from behind one of the cargo crates. Her eyes were bloodshot. “What’re you doing over here?”

  “Have you seen the Ironblood?” he asked, pretending he hadn’t noticed she had been crying.

  “Not since before the ship lost power,” said Lenda, wiping her nose with the back of her arm. “The captain’s gone looking for Ana.”

  “I know—she at least answered her comm-link,” he grumbled, and whirled around toward the opposite hallway, trying to remember what the ship’s map looked like. He’d told Robb to go into the ventilation shaft over there—the one with the destroyed grate—then that meant . . .

  He went that way.

  “Don’t wait for me. Once you see Siege and Ana, get off the ship!” he shouted back to Lenda, and took off running toward a door at the other end of the hull, grabbing a helmet off the floor—assuming it was Robb’s.

  If the ship had powered down, that meant its emergency functions were depowering, too. He did not want to be swimming around on this ship in zero gravity. He hated zero gravity.

  I’m going to kill Robb if he’s just not answering his comm-link, he thought, tripping on his own feet, as he followed down the hallway Robb would have shimmied alongside in the air shaft. It was dark, and he could barely see.

  I’m going to kill him when I find him.

  But in his head, kill sounded suspiciously like another word.

  Foolish, self-centered Ironblood! And, just as vehemently, Foolish me.

  The engine room must be somewhere in this area. He would search through every corridor until he found it. The ventilation shaft hadn’t taken Robb far. Just a few rooms, but the longer Jax ran, the farther it seemed to be.

  Finally, he slid into the next hallway—and stopped.

  It was a dead end. His heart plummeted like a rock into his toes. He was lost—was he lost? No, he couldn’t be. Solani were never lost. Solani knew exactly where they were exactly when they needed to—

  Someone stepped out of the room at the end.

  Dark, curly hair, sun-kissed skin, a lightsword in his hand illuminating the corridor like a flickering star. The boy lifted his sky-colored eyes to Jax.

  “Ma’alor,” he breathed in relief, then a little louder, “Robb!”

  His legs went faster than his mind, darting down the corridor before he could gather what little decorum and dignity he had left. The Ironblood looked flustered to see him.

  “What are you—why are—”
br />   “Here, put this on,” Jax interrupted, handing him the helmet. “Why weren’t you answering your comm-link?”

  A sigh whooshed through the ship as the gravitational systems shut off. Jax felt his stomach float first, then the rest of him. He tried to claw his way toward a wall.

  Robb seemed perfectly at ease to float—he didn’t seem in a hurry to leave at all, actually. “Why’re you here?”

  “Is that how you say thank you?” he asked, incredulous. Even with his long limbs, the walls were too far away. He couldn’t grab ahold of anything. Unless he wanted to grab ahold of the Ironblood. “I’m trying to save your pretty ass.”

  “I didn’t ask you to—and stop with the backhanded compliments,” Robb snapped. “Leave me alone.”

  “You honestly want to die here, then? On the forgotten side of Palavar?”

  Robb finally looked up to Jax, eyes rimmed red—as if he’d been crying. “My mother would say I deserved it. Like my father.”

  Jax recognized the note of bitterness in his voice, and despite his carefully built walls, his heart gave a lurch. You found him, then. “Robb . . .”

  “Mother would say this was the legacy I earned.” His eyebrows knit together. “So yes, I want to die here. I deserve to die h—”

  Jax took Robb by the face, fingers in his hair, so this insufferable Ironblood could look nowhere else but at him. Every speck of stardust in his being told him to let go. Being so close was a hazard, the thin gloves of his space suit the only thing separating skin from skin.

  What Robb didn’t realize was that Jax knew something about legacy, too. How stories were never all true or all lies. How the Solani gift to read the stars had slowly faded over a thousand years into one of those many stories, and how he was the last bit of truth left.

  “Screw legacy,” he said, the space between them barely a breath, but just enough to not touch, just enough to orbit without ever colliding. He pushed a curl behind Robb’s ear, but it sprang back. “I was worried about you.”

  For a moment, it felt like the words didn’t register.