Second Chance Angel Read online

  Which would have been fine, had her choices helped her actually deal with the memories and emotional trauma caused by our experiences in that war. On the surface, it looked like she was handling things well by leveraging her pain into an entertainment career. But she wasn’t processing the emotional information, wasn’t dealing with the root traumas. She simply let it rock through her and out into the club, and then she locked it away—and remained as wounded as ever. And worst of all, her hatred of me kept me from helping her navigate the pain. I, too, was part of her old life. I’d been there for every moment since her enlistment, a part of her. She blamed me for what we’d done, and been through, during the war. She had some justification. After all, my primary purpose was combat augmentation.

  But I was her angel. Her personal AI: designed to enhance her natural gifts, maintain her mods, and strengthen her mind and body to make her more effective in all aspects of life. Once upon a time, I’d been her closest confidant and greatest combat advantage.

  Now, she believed me to be her greatest liability.

  But as her angel, I had no choice. She was my host, and my purpose and programming was to protect her and augment her systems as required for whatever she chose to do. So I helped her sing her memories.

  There was a statistical possibility that one day, she would return to the healthy human being she’d once been. It hadn’t happened yet, but the possibility was there . . . even if it got more and more remote every day.

  All I could do was be ready.

  “Replay the memory of the last thirty minutes,” she said. “I need to know what happened when you took over.”

  Her words flagged an alarm in my programming. My entering override should not trigger a memory gap for her, unless the reason for the override was in itself traumatic. A single individual, easily dealt with, didn’t qualify. In the old days, I wouldn’t even have had to override her. Siren would have dispatched the threat herself and moved on to the next challenge.

  Since the war ended, though, she’d become less and less combat capable. I knew the war was over, that she didn’t have to maintain her previous levels of readiness, but recently that lack of capability had bled over into other aspects of her life. All indications showed she was suffering from post-traumatic stress, and her refusal to deal with or accept my help in mitigating said stress only compounded the problem exponentially. Thus I had reset my override threshold parameters in order to physically defend her. When the fan rushed us, she froze, clearly indicating she could not defend herself.

  But it hadn’t been traumatic, surely! Unless . . . was the trauma simply from the override itself?

  “Replay the memory—now!” Siren repeated, and I had no chance but to obey.

  “You’re on, Siren,” the stagehand said, lighting up his bioluminescent protuberances in his usual “go ahead” gesture. We gave him a nod and stepped out onto the darkened simwood boards of the main stage of A Curtain of Stars.

  Oxygen flooded into our system as she drew in her preparatory breath and released the first, crooning note. She started pianissimo but let the power build as the note extended. Inside the mind we shared, Siren did something she now did only when she sang: she opened the lock on her memory.

  Faces flashed across our mind: friends, teammates from the war, others. People we’d lost, people we’d killed. I felt the electrical impulses of her brain accelerate as her emotions poured forth from those forbidden remembrances. The fierce joy of camaraderie, the focused rush of combat . . . the empty, wrung-out feeling of not having any tears left. The bone-searing exhaustion. The shining, endlessly distant dream of home.

  As she sang, I wove the electromagnetic frequencies of each of these emotions through the timbre of her song. The club’s specialized amplifiers picked them up and broadcast them through the crowd, letting them feel what she felt.

  The spotlight came up as our sound swelled, and I subtly augmented her vision to be able to see into the darkness beyond the stage. The audience swayed, eddying around as they drank in the intoxicant of her emotions.

  I paid close attention to the movement of the crowd. Tongi, the club’s manager, hadn’t hired additional security for the night, despite Siren’s growing popularity, and my most basic programming demanded that I protect the life of my host against threat.

  Siren’s song wound to its natural end, and the crowd surged toward her as she let the last note die. Something moved at the edge of our vision. She turned our head, and our augmented eyes locked in on the scene. I dilated our perception of time and keyed my hyperawareness in for assessment: One target. Incoming. Past security. Hands reaching out . . .she wasn’t moving yet, letting him get too close.

  I repeated my threat assessment.

  Still nothing.

  Threshold reached. I slammed into override, taking executive control of the body per the directives of my programming.

  Anger rippled through our mind as Siren fought against the override, feedback from the conflict triggering a snarling sound that crackled and snapped through the club’s amplifiers. The situation met the definition of a threat, however, and so I stayed in command.

  I whipped out a hand and captured the attacker’s wrist, stepped in, turned, and used our hips to launch him head over heels to come crashing down on his back. Another step toward him. Pull. Heel to the chest. Crack.

  The attacker’s mouth gaped, but he’d lost his wind when he hit the boards of the stage. Instead of a scream, he let out a garbled kind of whistle that echoed through the audio amp.

  Not done. Another hard pull, and I flipped him over and sent him sliding across the stage toward the hapless bouncer.

  Siren shoved me to the back of awareness, her anger stinging through my syntaxes.

  “I followed protocol,” I said, making the words manifest in her brain as if she’d heard them audibly. “He was a threat.”

  “He was a fan,” she snapped back in silence. “He probably just wanted to meet me! Yet, as always, you default to extreme violence! How many times do I have to tell you? I don’t want your protection anymore!”

  I didn’t say anything, but simply looked through our shared memory at the figure of the attacker. He looked pathetic enough at the moment, with his cheek pressed to the surface of the boards, red-rimmed eyes tearing as the bouncer twisted his arm up behind his shoulder in a submission hold. But I recalled the look on his face as he charged the stage: half manic, half sly. As if he had some plan.

  “You all right, Siren?” the bouncer asked while he patted down the attacker with a surprisingly professional air.

  “Fine,” she said, anger at me clipping her tone. “Just get him the fuck out of here.”

  “And away from my demented angel,” she thought, but did not say aloud.

  “You got it,” the bouncer said as we turned away. She stomped back to our dressing room, where a solicitous Tongi waited.

  “You were not hurt?” The Omak club manager was tapping a pseudopod in his species’ version of a solicitous gesture.

  “No,” Siren said. “I’m fine. The bouncer has him outside.”

  “Hmmm. As well he should. That rogue human should never have gotten so close to you,” Tongi groused. “I should dock his pay.”

  “Don’t do that.” Siren reached out to wave a hand over the bioscanner that locked her dressing room door. “He did his best. He’s obviously an unmod, and, as you can see, I can defend myself better and faster than anyone else.”

  “Of course, of course. Beautiful and deadly. That’s why you keep packing them in every night, Siren. That’s why you’re my star.” Tongi had a sycophantic habit of agreeing with nearly everything Siren said. She found it irritating, but it was useful sometimes.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m really tired. I’d just like to get cleaned up and go home.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Muc
k

  By the time I’d finished with Dengler and Shar, I could hear the club patrons hitting the corridor out front. The band was likely leaving with the crowd to continue the party elsewhere, an endless traveling procession of desperate attempts to forget pain or simply feel again.

  A fairly common exercise for most since the war ended. More than a hundred years of fighting did that to a people. On those rare occasions I traveled to the bottom of my own bottle and felt the urge to philosophize, I wondered if humanity would need at least another hundred years to heal.

  Which begged the question: Do sorrow and pain have a half-life? And if so, is that half-life measured in decades or centuries? It’s been nearly twenty-five years since the Administration ripped my angel from me, and most days the wound feels just as raw and open as the day they did it.

  I suppose I—or someone better qualified—might even find out someday. Even unmanaged by the angels designed for the purpose, the doctors say my mods should extend my lifespan for centuries.

  I try not to think about that, especially when I’m at the bottom of a bottle. According to the religion I grew up in, suicides go to hell.

  Then again, to conservative unmods like the Brethren, bouncing at a nightclub for any length of time might seem like an eternity serving a hellish sentence imposed by an especially depraved kind of devil.

  I would have sighed, but there were enough sighs in the moist, cloying atmosphere of Last Stop. Why add one more?

  I went back into the club through the side door, intending to help usher the last patrons out, then stopped at a wave of one of Tongi’s pseudopods. The big Omik was talking with Siren on the stage. She had changed out of her performance outfit into street clothes, the change failing to detract from her inherent beauty.

  “I can go alone,” Siren was saying as the door closed behind me.

  “As he is just returned from removing the human refuse that attacked your person, Ralston will take you home,” Tongi said, outer lid of his central eye shuttering closed even as the lesser ones positioned around his mouth opened.

  “He will?” Siren glanced my way, gave a tentative smile I tried to return without looking needy.

  “Sure will, ma’am.” I tried to play it cool, but she’d fascinated me since she’d first started at the club, and not just for her looks. She was beautiful—and I wasn’t immune to that—and an amazing singer and all. But there was something about her memories—not just the way she sang them—that whispered to me of a shared experience. Just like the marquee claimed, A Curtain of Stars offered the cutting edge of emotional amplification technology. It was basically the same tech that had allowed elite hunter-killer teams to transmit and process neurological impulses among the members of a unit during the war. Only instead of resulting in a team that moved, thought, and fought as one frighteningly efficient organism, the club’s amps allowed a skilled singer to tap into their own memories and emotions and broadcast them among the patrons. If the singer sang, and sang well, from happy memories, the place could overflow with raucous joy. If the singer sang of pain, sorrow, and grief without relent, then the club could descend into despair.

  That was Siren’s gift: inviting her listeners to—and then through—the painful lessons of her experiences without ever abandoning them, hopeless and torn, to those experiences. Listeners, especially ones who had gone through experiences like hers and believed themselves alone in the universe, could find in her performances a powerful, cathartic release from pain.

  With Siren, there were some who just reveled in the performance, in catching glimpses of a wounded, still-beating heart, and then there were others, like me, who took solace from the knowledge we were not alone. These and a thousand other emotional reactions met her performances, made her almost-famous out here in this little corner of the Administration. Her lyrics were never specific about what she’d done during the war, but I knew the flavor of the emotions her songs summoned in me, and they tasted of my own truths. That whisper of shared truths drew me to Siren, even though I didn’t know much about her. To be honest, I suppose every veteran that watched her sing felt something similar.

  “Not sure I need an escort, even so,” she was saying.

  “I will not have a reputation for failing to protect the talent that graces my stage.” For a species lacking bilateral symmetry, Tongi spoke with a relatively straight face, but I knew exactly how much he hated paying for my services.

  “And I’m happy to, really,” I added.

  “Fair enough,” she said, but I didn’t miss how tightly she held her bag.

  “Thank you, Ralston, I will reimburse you tomorrow,” Tongi said, departing on silent cilia.

  “Want to wait a bit for the crowd to clear off?” I nodded toward the front of the club as I tapped my PID, getting ready to summon a ride if she had other ideas.

  “Sure.”

  “Drink in the meantime? PID is saying that station traffic is a mess right now. It might be a while before our ride shows.” I asked, putting my PID back in my pocket.

  “Not tonight. Got an early lunch tomorrow.”

  “All right,” I said. And because it was true, I added, “Great performance tonight.”

  “The singing, or me letting my reflexes take out a fan?” She looked away as she asked the question.

  I grinned. “Both. Haven’t seen that level of skill since the war.”

  She looked down, gave a small nod.

  Damn, I was making her uncomfortable.

  I held up my hands. “Hey, sorry, I didn’t mean to dredge shit up.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “In better shape than he deserved. I found some bliss on him. That shit kills.”

  “Sure does,” she said. And because I’d clearly piqued her interest, went on: “Did you know bliss was designed by our side?” The light from the club’s flashing LED sign flickered over her face.

  “What?” I felt my heart thump against my ribcage on meeting her eye.

  “Yeah, some of the minds in the War Department’s R&D thought they could help returning war-fighters with it.”

  “Really?” I had heard rumblings about that, but I liked her attention too much to risk saying so and potentially silencing her.

  “Of course, the team responsible botched the testing, or covered up the side effects on purpose, so Public Health didn’t know how addictive it was until after they rolled it out and . . .”

  “And a lot of us were already hooked,” I finished for her.

  She was silent again. Someone in the crowd of revelers ahead let out a braying laugh.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Who, what?”

  “Who did you lose?” I asked, gently.

  A snort, then: “Am I that easy a read?”

  I shrugged. “I was CID.”

  “Criminal Investigation Division? And you let me think you didn’t know about bliss?” She smiled to show she wasn’t angry.

  “Honestly, I hadn’t heard much in the way of details. I . . . left . . . the service shortly before bliss really hit, even among the veteran population.” A partial truth. Near the end of my term, there had been quite a few dealers and even more addicts being added to the prison population.

  “My team’s medic got hooked. Died just a few weeks after we were discharged.”

  “Sorry to hear it.” I shook my head, thankful that if she’d registered my hesitation discussing my discharge, she was kind enough to avoid mentioning it.

  A more comfortable silence settled, interrupted by my PID declaring our ride had arrived.

  “Where to?” I asked as we exited the club.

  “The Golden Arms Apartments.”

  “Right.” I typed in the destination after we took our seats. It occurred to me she could have used her angel to get us a ride, but I assumed she was being polite.

  The cab obe
diently pulled away.

  I agonized for the next several minutes over what to say to get the conversation rolling again. Eventually we pulled out on the thoroughfare that led to the Golden Arms. I had to say something.

  “How long do you plan on staying at the club?” I blurted like a moron. In my defense, she was the club’s star performer . . . and so beautiful it almost hurt to look at her. And I don’t lie well enough to myself to believe I’m at all attractive, unless you dig scars and bent noses, then I’m your peach. She should have been completely, totally, beyond my reach.

  “As long as they’ll have me, I suppose. No one is exactly battering down my door to get me to perform elsewhere.”

  I shook my head. “Not for nothing, but I find that hard to believe.”

  “Kind of you to say.” She shrugged, looking out at the passing district. “Honestly, I think I might have missed my shot for the truly big time, and I’m all right with that. I was never really into it for the fame or money, anyway.”

  “Oh?” Surprise forced me to look at her directly. The quality of her beauty was such that it made my eyes water and my mouth dry. I forced myself to look past that exquisite shell of silky black hair, smooth curves where she wasn’t hard muscle, and bright blue eyes that never really seemed to smile. When she wasn’t on stage the lines of her body were perpetually tense, shoulders hunched, arms habitually crossed to defend against some threat only she knew to look out for. There was pain there. Pain I had only seen her express while performing. A pain I wanted to soothe away. Not knowing how—or even how expressing a desire to do so would be received—I kept my thoughts to myself.

  “Memory singing used to help, you know? I’d get nightmares . . . other things. But these days . . . the singing doesn’t seem to do the trick like it used to, know what I mean?”