The abandoned classroom at Gale City College was shrouded in shadows, the pale Martian moonlight filtering through dusty windows. Patricia’s metallic features gleamed faintly in the gloom, only half her face visible in the twilight as Bud and Laz entered.
“Why didn't you tell us?” Bud said before Patricia had even turned toward them. “Your captured operative—she's the woman who was with Trip at the Carnival of the Dancing Robots. That seems like a vital omission, wouldn’t you say?"
Patricia remained unnaturally calm, her obsidian eyes unblinking. "I couldn’t reveal more than was necessary about the resistance. Operational security is paramount."
"Security?" Bud scoffed. "We walked in there blind!"
“You hardly needed to know her precise identity to effectuate a rescue.”
Bud's tail lashed back and forth. “Like Earth we didn’t. You let us stroll right into the Academy knowing full well she could have already revealed to the FOG who Laz and I are?”
Patricia's voice remained level. "The situation is quite sensitive.”
“Well, unless you want it to get a whole lot more sensitive, you’d better start spilling your circuits.”
If robots could sigh, Patricia appeared as if she would have. She raised her face to the ceiling, then rolled shoulders. “That woman is the leader of AMEN. She was captured during a recent mission to free androids set for the Carnival. FOG is attempting to rewrite her neural net, hoping to break through her encrypted memories and expose our location. That young man you saw with her at the Carnival is a specialist at manipulating cybernetic neurology.”
“His name is Trip,” Laz said, speaking for the first time since their arrival. He still hadn’t fully recovered from his reaction to the news of the AMEN operative’d identity and his voice was distant. “He was there, at the instructor’s lounge, tonight.”
“Trip Graves was here?” Patricia’s voice was suddenly sharp. “In Gale City?”
“Roaches are never far from a mess,” Laz murmured.
“I thought he’d returned to the Valley.”
“Who is he?” Bud asked.
Patricia was silent for a moment, then seemed to shake herself from some private reverie.
“Like I said, just a specialist trying to steal information from AMEN’s leader. But if he’s returned, we can’t have much more time.”
“Well, maybe if you’d been forthcoming with us to start we wouldn’t be in such a bind now.”
"Every piece of information is a potential leak," Patricia countered. "I made a calculated decision."
“You didn’t need to tell us she was AMEN’s leader to give us a better idea of what we were walking into. What’s her name? At least tell us that so we can stop with the ‘dark-haired woman’ moniker.” Honestly, he didn’t really care what her nae was. He just felt entitled to make demands of Patricia after what she’d done.
"That's classified."
The muscles in Bud’s jaw began to twitch as a growl burbled at the back of his throat.
"That's enough, Bud." Laz’s tone was gentle but firm. “Why don’t you lay down?” He knelt and released the dog bed from its metallic cylinder, then turned to Patricia, offering a disarming smile, the distress he’d been displaying since leaving the instructor’s lounge abruptly gone. "I understand your need for secrecy. We're all taking risks here."
Bud couldn't believe what he was hearing.
"You can't blame her, Bud," Laz continued. "She doesn't really know us from FOG thugs."
"Like Mercury she doesn’t," Bud retorted. "FOG doesn't employ cyborgs or langdogs."
Patricia's voice cut through the tension. "Can we really say that, after what you discovered in that hidden corridor?"
“How do you know about that?”
“Lazarus messaged me before you arrived.”
“You transmitted that over the airwaves?” Bud snapped over his secure channel with Laz.
“Relax, Captain. I used one of your encryption protocols. And Patricia might be right. After all, where there’s a fermenter, there’s sure to be liquor nearby.”
Bud growled in reply, the sound needing no translation. But he didn’t look at Patricia, either. He was just as annoyed at himself, now, as he was at the android or his owner. He hadn't fully considered the broader implications of what they'd uncovered. Gale City’s Academy wasn't even FOG's largest facility. The capital at Valles Marineris dwarfed anything the FOG had here. How many other installations did they have working on cyborgs? The possibilities were staggering—hundreds, maybe thousands of cyborgs could be working for FOG in plain sight.
Patricia seemed to understand Bud’s thoughts. "The cyborg experiments are a problem for another day," she said, the edge leaving her tone. "We have more pressing concerns. Our satellite scans indicate that AMEN’s leader has been transferred from the Academy to FOG headquarters. We’ll need to break in, and quickly. If they’ve delved deep enough to know as much about AMEN as you report, that means there's only one more layer of encryption in neural net protecting the rebellion’s location on Phobos."
The fur along the back of Bud’s neck rose. Despite all his misgivings about Patricia and her secrets, he understood the situation’s gravity. If the dark-haired woman was broken, he might never get the answers he so desperately sought about Moose and his past. He and Patricia might have differing aims, but they both needed to protect AMEN.
Laz’s voice broke through Bud's turbulent thoughts. "What's the plan, then? How do we rescue the dark-haired woman?"
Why was it that Laz sounded so serious whenever he mentioned that woman? Before Patricia had inserted herself into their lives, Bud could have counted on one paw the number of times Laz had seemed serious since the Purge.
Patricia quickly diverted Bud’s attention, though. Her eyes seemed to glow with an inner light as she began to outline their options. And similar to Laz, there was something in the way she spoke about the dark-haired woman—a hint of emotion that seemed at odds with her otherwise cool demeanor. Was it concern? Admiration? Bud couldn’t place it, but it scraped at his mind like a rusty bolt.
"FOG headquarters uses advanced thermal imaging for security,” Patricia said. “Your onboard temperature shield won't be sufficient for a break-in, Bud."
Bud's tail swished thoughtfully. "I have an idea to overcome the thermal imagers. In fact, it's a plan I've been wanting to try out for years." At least he’d finally have a good excuse to address an annoyance that had plagued him for years.
Patricia looked skeptical, but Laz placed a hand on her shoulder. "Trust Bud," he said with a wink. "He's full of surprises."
Bud felt almost as awkward as Patricia looked as she shrugged Laz’s hand away. "We still need to figure out where in the headquarters they're holding her," she said.
Patricia took out a couple tablets and set them on the dusty desk at the front of the lecture hall.
“This is all the information we have on the FOG HQ,” she said. “I’ve also uploaded it onto this, if you’ll allow me.” She held up a data chip that would fit into the data port on Bud’s collar.
He certainly did not want to accept the data chip. There could be anything on it. But he didn’t have much choice. To ensure the plan he had in mind worked, Bud would need all the information he could get. Reluctantly, and only after raising a few extra firewalls around his neural net, he walked up to Patricia and exposed his neck to her. She clicked the data chip into place.
The information was behind a low-level encryption that Bud found mildly insulting for how easy it was to crack. The machine language on which the data was based was foreign to Bud, old android code that hadn’t been used in generations. Some of it even his processors couldn’t translate, but the vast majority was simple enough, and soon he joined Laz and Patricia in pouring over the intricacies of the FOG headquarters.
At least, he joined Patricia. Laz’s earlier bout of sincerity had departed.
"Did you know," Lazarus interjected suddenly, "that the building's foundation includes recycled materials from the first Martian landers?"
“I didn’t,” Patricia replied, making the mistake of taking Laz entirely seriously. “What advantage do you think that will give us?”
“Advantage? None that I can think of. I just find it fascinating from a historical perspective.”
Androids are incapable of pursing their lips, but Patricia very nearly did anyway, and it was enough to make Bud smile despite everything facing them.
A few minutes later, Laz piped up again. "Oh, and get this—the boardroom tables are made from compressed Martian regolith!"
This time Patricia only grunted, not looking up from her datapad.
The night stretched on. Bud had to hand it to AMEN—their intelligence was thorough. Everything he needed was on the chip Patricia had supplied. It was almost as if he were scanning through an unrestricted terminal inside the facility itself. Even the locations of the high security prison cells were clearly marked on the schematics she’d obtained.
“Patricia?” Laz asked abruptly. The android didn’t look up, obviously expecting another irrelevant factoid. But Bud paused. There was a distinct change to his owner’s inflection. Not quite the sincerity that seemed to overcome him at talk of the dark-haired woman, but something out of the ordinary.
"It must concern you that FOG appears to be training cyborgs to do its bidding."
Patricia glanced up briefly, though she tried to pretend she hadn’t. Laz, though, fixed her with an uncharacteristically delicate look and kept it trained on her until she spoke.
"It's the one advantage we believed we had over FOG. Androids, at least, can think faster than humans, process large amounts of data in a fraction of the time. But combine even a small corps of cyborgs with FOG's superior technology? We’d lose whatever edge we might have had."
Lazarus nodded solemnly. "It will be like fighting the plague with leeches."
Bud, ignoring Laz's non sequitur, focused on Patricia. "Superior technology? Between your holograms and signal amplifiers, you seem to have some yourself."
Patricia scoffed. "Only what we've stolen from FOG. Why do you think I'm the only AMEN operative down here? We have little else besides what I'm equipped with."
Laz placed a hand on Patricia's shoulder. "If an old man and grumpy langdog could make it this far, AMEN will be just fine."
"I'm not grumpy," Bud barked indignantly.
But Laz and Patricia weren't listening, staring at each other. Suddenly, Laz leaned down and kissed Patricia. Her initial reaction was surprise, then she seemed to return the intimacy for a moment before pushing away.
"That would be bad for the rebellion," Patricia murmured, looking away from Laz.
Bud was too shocked to have reacted at all. Once again, Laz’s vital signs and neural activity were elevated far beyond normal. A far cry from the typical jolt of adrenaline Laz got when chasing women in bars. This seemed... Mercury! It almost seemed genuine.
"That wasn't what I was expecting," Laz said softly, more to himself than anyone else.
Patricia cleared her throat. "I have some preparations to make. I'll send you a coded communication to set a meeting place for our attempt on FOG headquarters tomorrow."
As she turned to leave, she looked at Bud. "Your plan for the heat imagers better be as good as you say."
Bud's tail twitched. "You just worry about figuring out where they're keeping your spy."
Patricia scowled before walking away. Laz watched her go, a wistful expression on his face.
"She's nearly as confusing as the biodome's weather patterns," Laz mused.
Bud settled down on his dog bed with a huff. "That's one thing we can both agree on."
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Note: I wrote this story with the assistance of AI. To read about my process, see the following post:
buymeacoffee.com/dtkane/mars-174-years-after-earth-destruction