Suck my cock, you faggot.
Eliasz bunched himself into a defensive posture under the table, metal glinting in his fists and a snap of electricity showing his perimeter was active.
At the sight of her boss going down, Roopa scrambled up a particularly thick tree trunk to Paladin’s left and shot at his head, trying to take out some of his sensors. The wet wood protecting Eliasz started to smoke under her steady shots. Redbeard ran toward the stairs and Youssef scrambled after him, terror distorting his gait. More feet rang on the steps: Two men were coming down, their faces shielded and guns bared. A tiny red triangle logo stood out on their chests, marking them as indentured to a private security company in the Zone. These men belonged to the pirates in the same way Paladin belonged to the Federation.
Paladin covered Eliasz, his shields spread around the man like sheltering wings, and Roopa took out one of the sensors on his back. Now he had to shift to catch her movements, and of course more trouble was coming. Those men on the stairs had guns that Paladin’s armor could withstand for only so long. From his position beneath the table near Paladin’s knees, Eliasz reached out and cut a horizontal line of light into the air, slicing one of the armored men’s legs off at the ankles. The man’s detached feet smoked in a tidy pile next to his writhing body, but his partner just stepped over him and kept coming. With a well-aimed shot to the bot’s right shoulder, he shattered Paladin’s carapace.
That faggot tried to touch me.
Roopa worked on the break in Paladin’s armor with her gun, trying to sever the arm that the bot had already lost once. Eliasz didn’t have enough charge for another laser shot like the last one, but he had a tiny smart grenade for Roopa’s tree. She hit the floor without ever vocalizing, charred wood lodged in her ripped throat and gut.
Even with some of his sensors ruined, Paladin could see Redbeard’s distress signal shoot over the network. And hear Youssef screaming about a helicopter on the roof. The pirates were trying to escape.
Eliasz signaled to Paladin. To stop Redbeard and Youssef, they would have to take out the remaining guard, whose footless partner was scrabbling for a weapon through his pain. Paladin ran toward the spiral staircase first, squirting a last stream of bullets from his chest, throwing his weight to the left just in time to land his fist in the footless guard’s chest. The man’s alloy armor—the same material that made up the bot’s carapace—kept Paladin from penetrating. But Paladin felt the reassuring vibration of shattering bone radiate up his arm. The guard wouldn’t die right away, but he wouldn’t be reaching for a weapon again, either.
“Faggot” is generally a pejorative term for a homosexual man. It is classified as hate speech in most regions where homosexuality is legal.
Eliasz threw his last grenade and missed—something about the remaining guard’s perimeter threw it off. But the blast had him off-balance long enough that Paladin was able to put his body between Eliasz and the other man, clearing the stairs.
“They’re on the roof trying to escape in a helicopter, Eliasz.” Paladin said in a damage-distorted voice. “Get them and I’ll hold this one off.”
It was going to come down to hand-to-hand combat, and his opponent was an indentured guard whose life depended on the survival of his clients. He would never stop fighting. Paladin didn’t want Eliasz down here, in case things went badly.
As Eliasz disappeared up the stairs, the guard turned his face shield to Paladin. He was nearly as tall as the bot, and armor made him just as bulky.
“I know your model, biobot. You’ve got a human brain under that armor.”
Paladin kicked the man in the thigh, hoping to short out the power source for his perimeter field. He did no damage, and the man punched Paladin low on his chest carapace, clearly aiming to damage the human brain inside. The man did know his way around Paladin’s model, but like most humans, he made the mistake of assuming the brain was what controlled the bot.
As Paladin smashed his fist into the man’s shielded face, he realized why Eliasz had used the word “faggot.” He thought the bot’s body parts were just like a human’s, and that a heavily armored body signified manhood. Sex with a military bot would be what one branch in his taxonomy called “shit for faggots.” This also explained why Eliasz had been so curious about the origin of the bot’s brain. He assumed it was the seat of Paladin’s identity.
The guard staggered, recovered, and slammed his body against Paladin’s wounded arm. As Paladin felt his limb go numb, he delivered a killing blow to the guard’s perimeter power source. Then he grabbed the man’s head in his nearly disabled hand and cradled it against his chest for a minute.
“My brain is just an advertising gimmick,” Paladin vocalized, echoing what the bots had told him in the Kagu Robotics Foundry. “It’s to make humans think I’m vulnerable. But it has no real functionality.” Then he ripped the man’s face shield off and crushed his skull against his breastplate. For an instant, there were useless chunks of brain inside and outside his carapace, inches away from each other.
As Paladin ascended the spiral stairs, he sent out a query to the Kagu Robotics Foundry network where he’d been assembled. He wanted to know everything he could about the history of his brain.
Paladin found Eliasz at the top of the stairs in a room that had obviously been the pirates’ data center and private meeting area. A curved glass wall looked out over rows of solar panels, the farthest away blurring into a dark, choppy texture almost indistinguishable from the rocky ground. Another wall was lined with server cabinets, most devoted to the legit solar operation. Just a few contained the farm’s real business, and those were currently being reduced to blobs of drooling fire by some well-placed bowls of thermite. Redbeard was crumpled next to the flames, his body partially consumed by them.
On a sturdy living-wood ladder that led up through a door in the ceiling, Youssef was frozen in the sights of Eliasz’ blaster. A helicopter was warming up on the roof over their heads, wind from its propeller agitating the smoke in the room.
Youssef was crying, his body going into shock. “Why are you doing this? Are you IPC agents?”
“Yes.” Eliasz squeezed off a shot. “And that makes you a dead pirate.”
Youssef’s body jerked once and fell, a clean, charred hole in his head emitting only the tiniest amount of matter. With a tight gesture, Eliasz motioned Paladin to the helicopter on the roof. The self-piloting vehicle was easy to commandeer with their IPC credentials.
As they rose over photovoltaic fields, Paladin found that he could communicate with the sprinkler system again. He turned it on. At least the energy grid would be preserved.
Just as Paladin was returning to other data-analysis tasks, Eliasz reached over and gripped his arm—the one that wasn’t dangling in a useless, agonizing wreck at his right side. The man’s heart was pounding, though his excitement had spiked and was diminishing.
“You did good back there, buddy.”
“I’m glad we both made it out.”
“Let’s hope our luck holds in Casablanca.”
“We’re going back to the Federation?” That seemed like the wrong way to follow Jack’s trail out of Iqaluit.
“Best way to stay hot on the trail is sometimes to backtrack, Paladin.” Eliasz steered the helicopter back to the airfield where they’d landed two days ago. “Somebody in Casablanca will know where Jack goes when she wants to hide. We’ll find her faster that way than trying to trace her through highway surveillance.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Human networks are the most vulnerable,” Eliasz replied. They landed just as the red sunset was transforming Iqaluit’s dome into a blood blister.