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Once aboard the Med Barge, she could slip onto a shuttle loaded with supplies for the planet’s surface. She was small enough not to be considered a threat and she wouldn’t be carrying any weapons, and so she wouldn’t attract any attention from the guards at the loading docks on the planet’s surface. Which meant she could stroll right past them in a way that a fully armed Kindred warrior couldn’t.
Once out of the loading docks, she would track down Dark and Light and hopefully convince them to come with her. When she got them alone, she would call Brock with a remote transmitter located in one of her fake leg enhancements. The Beast Kindred would swoop down to the planet’s surface just long enough for Dark and Light and Lili to climb aboard and then call the Kindred Mother Ship to fold space.
They would be through the fold before the Dark Kindred even knew their planetary space had been violated. Then Lili could take the guys back to a private suite in the Mother Ship and do her best to break through the chemical emotion block they both had in their brains.
How she was going to do that, she wasn’t sure. She had decided that she would worry about finding them on Zeaga Four and getting them back to the Mother Ship first. Everything else she would worry about later.
As plans went, it wasn’t the easiest—or the safest—but it was the best one they could come up with for breaching the dangerous Closed Planet. And so here Lili was, stepping off a supply shuttle onto the surface of Zeaga Four—or Z4 as the natives called it.
She took a deep breath as she scanned the dark gray skies above her. Yipper had warned her that the entire planet was fully mechanized and industrialized but Lili hadn’t really realized what that meant until this moment.
Looming overhead in the distance, were impossibly tall skyscrapers. The ground was completely paved without even an inch of dirt or grass showing. In fact, Lili didn’t see a bit of greenery anywhere. No trees or flowers or bushes—nothing but metal and concrete. The air smelled like dust and motor oil and strange, harsh chemicals that were probably toxic if you breathed them too long.
What an awful place to live! Lili felt another burst of certainty—she had to rescue Dark and Light from this terrible planet. They didn’t belong here.
Everywhere she looked she saw machines and machinery. Even the people—who were all male—all looked like they were half-machine. Some had robot arms or legs and others had scopes on their eyes—which reminded her of Dark and Light. Others didn’t even have legs—she saw a number of huge cyborgs that looked Kindred from the waist up but had forklifts for their lower halves.
These forklift-centaur creatures were trundling back and forth, scooping up pallets of supplies from the Med Barges and taking them to various warehouses located around the perimeter of the landing area. All of their faces were completely blank—utterly devoid of emotion. It was clear they didn’t love or hate their jobs or look forward to quitting time. Probably they would be content to keep going back and forth from the shuttles to the warehouses forever. It was a deeply creepy sight.
Then Lili saw something even creepier. Coming towards her was a Dark Kindred who looked to be almost all robotic parts. In fact, the only part of him that looked normal was his nose, mouth, and a single eye. The other eye had been converted to a telescopic sight which extended out as he focused on Lili.
But even worse than the cyborg guard, was the creature he had at his side. It looked like a Doberman Pinscher made out of metal.
Lili stared at the dog, recognizing it from Yipper’s description when he was warning her about the dangers of Z4. It was a sniffer—one of the canine cyborgs bred especially to sniff out the pheromones organic life forms made when they had emotions. The body’s chemistry is constantly changing on a second-to-second basis and the sniffers were hyper-aware of any “feel scents” in their immediate vicinity.
She stiffened as she saw the guard and his dog coming towards her. The creature’s eyes were glowing red and its pointed metal ears swiveled one hundred and eighty degrees, like miniature satellite dishes searching for signals. It had a silver, segmented tail which stuck straight out behind it and didn’t wag at all.
Lili was not a dog person. When she was only a little girl—five or six—she’d been chased and attacked by a neighbor’s Doberman when she had crossed into the yard next door to retrieve a ball. The dog had bitten her leg, tearing holes right through the jeans she’d been wearing as she tried to run away.
If her mom hadn’t come out onto the porch and seen her and chased the Doberman away with a broom, Lili was certain it would have broken her bones. As it was, she’d had to get sixteen stitches to close the bite wounds and a round of rabies shots, since the dog hadn’t been vaccinated.
It remained one of her most vivid—and frightening—childhood memories. And now—seeing the huge robot dog approaching her—Lili felt a surge of fear she couldn’t control.
As though sensing her fear, the dog’s metal snout irised open and it lifted its head and began to inhale a steady stream of air from her direction.
Crap! What am I going to do?
For a moment Lili felt frozen in fear. Then she remembered the most important part of her disguise. Reaching for the back of her neck, she twisted the tiny metal knob that Yipper had implanted there.
At once the paralyzing fear she felt faded to nothing and she felt a numb coolness spreading over her entire body.
Nothing—I feel nothing.
It was true. The fear was gone and so was her anxiety about trying to find Dark and Light. She knew cognitively that it was very important that she find the two huge Kindred, but she no longer had any emotional reaction when she thought of them. They were simply an objective she needed to complete—which she would as soon as she had passed this obstacle.
The cyborg guard and his sniffer approached her and Lili waited, not saying or doing anything. She had a passing thought that she hoped her disguise was good enough to pass inspection, but the thought carried no worry or fear with it.
In addition to the metal sheaths she was wearing on her arm, chest, and both legs, she had on a tight black body-suit which covered her from her neck to her wrists and then on down to her ankles. She was wearing black boots with thick soles and her hair had been pulled back into a severe bun at the back of her neck. Other than being female and small, she looked as much as possible like a Dark Kindred.
“You there,” the guard said as he came up to her. “State your designation and your purpose here on Z4.”
“I am XR-17, here on leave from Med Barge 49,” Lili answered in a clipped, robotic voice. “I have finished a shift bringing medical supplies and I am in need of sustenance. I was told it is permitted to eat here before reporting back to the shuttle, which will not be leaving for some time.”
“Well…” The cyborg guard didn’t look completely satisfied by her answer. “My sniffer detected emotion pheromones coming from your direction,” he said.
“Negative. I have no emotions—my damper is intact,” Lili answered, exactly as Yipper had coached her to do.
“We will see about that. Find!” the guard barked, pointing at Lili.
