The Android Chronicles Book One: The Android Defense (7 page)

“Three’s better than two,”
Trista said.

The three of them walked
hesitantly to the small front door of the lab. Mandelie pushed it
open, half-expecting something to run out of the darkness at
her.

They walked into the small
lobby. The cheerful pale blue paint did not look cheerful anymore.
It looked faded and ghostly in the dim flickering light after
Trista turned on the light switch.

“The lights were working
alright before,” she said.

Mandelie paled when she saw
a patch of dark red color on the wall.

“That’s blood,” she
whispered.

“Holy crap,” Jake said.
“Don’t look, Mands.”

Mandelie tore her eyes away
from the patch and the three of them walked down the hallway where
the experiment rooms were.

“Room 1,” Trista said in a
low voice. “The Mind Portal project. I hope … I hope the police
didn’t dismantle it or do anything to it.”

She opened the door slowly.
The three of them looked inside.

There was nothing inside the
room but a huge rectangular box standing upright against the wall,
looking like a coffin. It was made of a strange, reflective green
plastic material. There were wires leading out of the bottom of the
box, connected to the wall.

“Look inside it, Trista,”
Mandelie said.

Trista was already
attempting to open the lid of the box, but it was extremely heavy.
Mandelie and Jake both tried to open it as well.

“That’s weird,” Trista said,
panting. “It’s never felt that heavy before. It almost feels like
there’s some kind of magnetic force pulling down on it, keeping it
closed.”

After a few more attempts,
the three of them stopped trying to open the box.

“Well, at least it still
looks like it’s in one piece,” Trista said. She wiped sweat from
her face.

“Let’s look at the other
rooms,” Jake said.

They left room 1 and checked
inside the other rooms. They were all stripped of their contents,
left bare except for furniture.

“Those cops must have taken
everything for evidence,” Trista said in disgust. “They even took
the anti-gravity shoes.”

“Um … no they didn’t,” Jake
said. “I’ve got them.”

“You do!” Mandelie
said.

“Well, your dad wanted me to
test them out in my free time,” Jake said. “So I took them home
with me. I told him I’d bring them back the next day. They’re at my
place.”

Trista looked
relieved.

“The other ongoing projects
were minor by comparison,” she said. “It’s the Mind Portal and the
anti-gravity shoes that really matter.”

“But we can’t look for clues
if the cops took everything,” Jake said.

“Keep looking,” Mandelie
said. “We’ll find something. Something the cops
overlooked.”

Chapter 16.

“Your five thirty meeting is
here,” Carlie said. She looked down at the appointment notes on her
iPad, noting that the meeting was labeled only “CONFIDENTIAL
V.I.P.”

“Good,” Damian said. He was
sitting behind his desk, while Brigite massaged his shoulders. He
waved her away curtly.

“Go back to floor forty,” he
said.

“Yes, sir,” Brigite said.
She left the room.

“You too, Carlie,” Damian
said. “I’ll call you when you can come back.”

Carlie disappeared as
well.

When she was gone, the
elevator doors opened and a man in a dark, expensive-looking suit
stepped out. He had white hair and a sharp, sallow face.

Damian walked towards him
and held out his hand.

“Glad you could make
it.”

“Of course,” the man said.
“This is an important occasion.” His voice was raspy, with a hint
of a European accent.

“Let’s sit down on the
couches,” Damian said.

He and the man sat down on
the couches in the sitting area.

The man leveled cold blue
eyes on Damian.

“We’ve been keeping tabs on
the progress of your androids,” he said. “We’re
impressed.”

“Good,” Damian said.
“They’re supposed to impress.”

The man leaned back against
the couch and clasped his hands together.

“We’re prepared to open our
coffers to you, and our network of influencers all over the world.
But our involvement won’t come without a price. You know what that
price is.”

“I know what it is,” Damian
said. “And I’m prepared to meet it.”

The man studied him
hard.

“You do want to change the
world,” he said. “But perhaps not in the way that the world
thinks.”

Damian smiled.

Brigite hurried back to the
fortieth floor from Damian’s office, running up the stairs in her
skimpy red bikini. Her steps echoed in the white marble stairwell.
She heard a door slam behind her and then suddenly she felt a hand
grab her neck and swing her against the wall.

Tony del Travio stood in
front of her, with a twisted smile.

“Where’ve you been, Brigite?
I was running diagnostics on all the other X-droids, but I didn’t
see you in the line-up.”

“I was attending to Mr.
Foster,” Brigite said.

“Mr. Foster, Mr. Foster,”
Tony mimicked. He grabbed her and yanked at her bikini
top.

Brigite screamed. Her scream
echoed in the stairs.

“Quiet,” Tony said, covering
her mouth with his hand. “There’s no use fighting, Brigite. I
disabled your shock system while you were sleeping.”

Brigite stared at
him.

Suddenly a strong arm locked
around Tony’s neck and dragged him away from Brigite. Tony gasped
for breath.

“If I ever see you try
something like that again, you’re dead,” Luke said to him in his
ear, quietly. “Do you understand?”

“Y – Yes,” Tony tried to
say. He waved his arms for emphasis.

Luke let him go. Tony
stumbled down the stairs, but not without casting a hateful look at
Luke.

Luke turned to
Brigite.

“Are you okay?”

Brigite nodded. She gathered
her fallen bikini top and pressed it against herself. She tried to
smooth her tangled bright blue hair.

“Thank you,” she
said.

“Come on,” Luke said, taking
her arm. “I’ll take you back up to floor forty.”

Chapter 17.

“So I thought we might be
able to begin by making a review of the Super Soldiers,” Lina said.
“You can meet the other product designers as well. But the Super
Soldiers are a good place to start because they’ve been having some
maintenance issues. You might have some ideas on how to fix
them.”

She and Luke were walking
down the long white hallway in Product Development. Ahead of them
there were three people huddled in a group, talking among
themselves.

“Hey guys!” Lina called to
them. “Meet Luke!”

The three designers turned
towards them. One of them was a tall, thin, angular woman with
iron-gray hair cut in a severe fringe. One was a short bearded man
with a visible stomach. The third was a brown-haired, round-faced
girl with extremely thick glasses.

“This is Melinda Darts,”
Lina said, indicating the tall gray-haired woman. “Joe Alvin, and
Ledia Halsen. They’re the three designers on the android lines,
besides me.”

The three people shook
Luke’s hand with immense interest.

“The three of us had a
chance to look at the data read outs from your imaging session,
Luke,” Joe said. “It floored us, everything that went into making
you. Your designer was a genius.”

“He is,” Luke
said.

“Is,” Joe said. “Can’t give
up hope, right?”

“I told Luke we’d start out
by showing him the progress on the Super Soldiers,” Lina said. “And
the kinks.”

“Right-o,” Ledia said.
“Sounds good. Let’s go. Captain Mercenare is at the stage where
he’s ready to interact.”

Luke followed the four
designers down the hall until they came to a room with a visible
window in the wall. Through the window Luke could see a tall
android with a fierce-looking face and a military shaved head. He
wore head to toe camouflage and was standing next to two
technicians as they examined him closely with tools.

Lina opened the door and
they went in.

The android immediately
raised his head and looked directly at Luke. There was something in
his eyes other than the blank expressions of the other androids. It
was ferocity and cunning.

“Luke, meet Captain Martin
Mercenare,” Lina said. “Mercenare for short.”

Luke locked eyes with
Mercenare who eyed him coldly.

“I can see that he is an
android,” he said. “But he’s not one of the Adventis
androids.”

“No,” Lina said. “Luke was
built somewhere else.”

“He’s here to take a look at
you, Martin,” Ledia said. “And the other Super Soldiers. We’re
trying to figure out how to make all of you capable of withstanding
an explosive attack, harsh weather, in short, how to make all of
you combat-ready.”

“My soldiers are all ready
for combat,” Mercenare said. “We need no … outside
interference.”

“The Super Soldiers were
programmed to be tough and hard,” Lina said in an undertone to
Luke. “We think it may have also affected their programming in
other ways. Especially Martin’s. It’s a good thing he’s programmed
to obey orders, otherwise we might all be in big
trouble.”

Mercenare yanked his arm out
of the grasp of one of the technicians.

“Why am I here? There’s no
reason for it,” he said. “All day long, prod and poke, that’s all
you humans do.”

“He’s not combat ready,”
Luke said. “He needs an armored exterior. That would go a long way
towards his improvement.”

Mercenare threw his head
back and laughed.

“Aren’t you the smart
android! An armored exterior? Perhaps your head is in need of an
armored exterior, before I break it open and smash its contents on
the floor.”

“Try it,” Luke said, with a
provoking smile.

Mercenare tried to lunge at
him, but the technicians held him back.

“Okay,” Ledia said. “Maybe
we should leave Martin alone to calm down for a few
minutes.”

“I am calm,” Mercenare said.
He resumed his still, haughty posture, though his eyes flickered
threateningly. “What rank does this android hold? What gives him
the right to voice his opinion?”

“He outranks you, Martin,”
Joe said. “You’d be better off restraining yourself when you’re
around him.”

Mercenare looked furious but
he did not move.

“But no Adventis android
outranks me,” he said quietly.

“No, you’re top dog around
here,” one of the technicians said, in a bored voice.

“So, an armored exterior,”
Lina said, making a note on her clipboard. “What else do you
suggest?”

“If you cut him open,
perhaps I will have more suggestions,” Luke said.

Captain Martin snarled
audibly.

“Maybe I’ll just show you
his imaging readings,” Lina said. “They’re back in my office. Let’s
move on to the next task at hand.”

Chapter 18.

Luke was slightly relieved
when he returned to his room after his time on the product
development floor was over and saw that Miranda was not there. He
immediately took off his shoes and stretched out on his four-poster
bed, the first time he had been able to make use of it.

He closed his eyes and
accessed his communication console. He touched the inside of his
wrist and the hologram keyboard appeared above him. He began typing
a message.

“Miss Miles.”

He sent the
message.

After a moment Mandelie’s
message came to him.

“How are you doing,
Luke?”

“Well enough, I guess. I’ve
just been helping Adventis improve their android technology. How
are you?” Luke said.

“Okay,” Mandelie said.
“Trista, Jake, and I finally got into the lab. We went there
looking for clues to what might have happened to my dad, but we
didn’t find anything. Do you know why the Mind Portal box isn’t
opening?”

“No,” Luke said. “It should
open easily.”

“It’s not,” Mandelie said.
“Something’s keeping the lid stuck.”

“That is
strange.”

“I’m beginning to feel a
little hopeless,” Mandelie said. “The police are acting like
they’ve given up looking for my father. I don’t know what to
do.”

“Come to Adventis,” Luke
said. “On a visit. We can talk, face to face.”

“How is that
possible?”

“Tomorrow, three o’clock,”
Luke said. “Wear sunglasses and some kind of disguise. I will meet
you in front of the glass front doors of the building.”