Mangled beyond recognition without the skin, tiny wires ran along the exposed, fractured ceramic skull. The bio-droid muscles in her face stood out like a beacon, highlighting what she truly was as she attempted to speak.

  Arion wanted to turn away, but found himself transfixed by the sight. He would never be able to put into words the emotions he was feeling in that moment as Alieha did her best to mouth words to him. With half her face torn away it was impossible to understand. The tremors wracking her body with each movement shook the spinning plate. He looked into her eyes as she stared back at him.

  Arion shut his eyes and for the first time since he was diagnosed with Kemtil so many annura before, prayed. Dear God. Please do not forsake this fallen son. Let these last few cycles all be some horrible fever dream. Let this all be a duwn terror. I would rather have the Kemtil claim me than let this be real. The alternative was too horrible to contemplate.

  Arion opened his eyes again. Alieha still lay there, still ravaged. He forced them closed and turned away. It was as if everything his father had ever said had become manifest. He had loved a machine and committed one of the ultimate sins against his Father’s religion, the religion of his youth. He couldn’t rationalize it: it can’t be true!

  A thump rang through the plate, then another and another. It had a rhythm, a pattern and it repeated a moment later. Arion recognized it. He commanded himself to not translate it. Then it changed, increasing in speed and activating his micomm. Before he could stop it, a message appeared in his mind’s eye. Kill me my love. Kill me my love… again and again.

  His eyes, still closed, Arion crawled over to Alieha. Feeling his way across to her, he touched her convulsing back and recoiled. He couldn’t do this, it didn’t matter what she was, he couldn’t. The message continued, adding a single new word. Please.

  He reached out again and traced his way up her spine towards her neck. His gloved hands transmitted every one of her movements and brought with them memories of caressing that back, of holding her, of… He cast the thoughts aside. He couldn’t let emotions distract him. He grabbed her head with his right hand and forced it against the plate, feeling the message change. He commanded his micomm off before it could relay the new plea.

  He increased the pressure with his right hand. Reaching under her hair with his left, he found a cluster of neurofibers jutting out from the back of her skull. He felt her lips move with his right hand in a vain attempt to speak to him. But the motion was soft, yielding and he thought of how he used to embrace those lips, how seductive they were, how they used to make love. It all came flooding back to him and his grip on the neurofibers lessened. I can’t do it. I can’t be the one to end her, not like this.

  Her tapping stopped for a moment. Then it returned to the original message. He felt her face tense in pain, in an agony he could only imagine.

  He resumed his grip and her message changed to the second one.

  He had to concentrate, had to put who she was out of his mind. Even in the vacuum of space, the neurofibers remained limp. He squeezed and Alieha jerked as one of the clusters burst in his hand. He did his best to ignore it and pulled his fist back, pulling masses of neurofibers with it. He opened his eyes and looked down at Alieha’s shattered face, her frozen eye staring back at him, pleading.

  “I’m sorry.”

  He punched, slamming his fist into the back of her poly-ceramic skull. The artificial bones shattered under the impact and surged ahead of his fist perforating artificial brain before he smashed it into jelly. He withdrew his hand with a violent jerk, tearing a great hunk of Alieha’s computerized brain free. He breathed at last, feeling no more movement, just his own ragged breathing and hearts beating in his chest.

  Arion sat back on the plate and looked up at the eternal sky. He couldn’t move, dared not move, lest he see Alieha again. He questioned everything as he stared into the unending darkness. What manner of man am I? I loved a machine, gave my heart and soul over to an automaton that mimicked a living being. Was my father right? Did accepting a machine into my body corrupt my soul until such soulless creatures were the only thing I could love?

  Two alarms activated simultaneously. The search parties were signaling to him, requesting his position. He ignored them. The orb must have gotten lost or he had drifted too far away. The second alarm came from his suit. His oxygen supply was running out.

  He didn’t care and turned towards Alieha’s limp arm, unable to look at her face. He took the hand in his own and remembered the first time he’d seen her in class. She had raised that perfect hand into the air to answer the instructor’s question. When he’d followed it down to its owner, he’d become mesmerized. She was gorgeous beyond compare; out of reach of any would-be lover. She rebuffed every cadet. Then, she’d done the unthinkable: she’d taken him as a lover.

  For almost an annura they’d been together, walking, talking, kissing and making love. He replayed every memory, relived every moment, every conversation, every soft touch and intimate connection. And then he relived their argument, and cursed his stupidity. She had all but said it then. Just as she had so many times before when she’d skirted around the truth of what she was. How could I have been so stupid? Why couldn’t I have seen it? And why couldn’t she have just come out and said it? Why did she lie to me like this for so long?

  But did she even know? She must have suspected. Did her programming keep her from revealing the truth, to herself and everyone around her? Did that programming include the ability to love? He’d never heard of such a thing before outside of vids and books. The cadre had to know. But why? Did Confed intend to replace their soldiers with machines like these? No, they couldn’t! That would violate the Cynial Accord banning the development and use of Synthetic Sentients as combatants.

  He turned back to her. No matter what she was, he loved the woman he thought her to be. He had intended to make things right with her if they both survived. Now, he had no way to do that. Her act of sacrifice, while it may have saved them all, had robbed him of the ability to apologize, to make things right.

  “Arion, where the Sheol are you?” Blazer’s voice rang through the link, his voice cracking.

  Arion activated his micomm out of habit and Alieha’s last message to him appeared. Live my love. I forgive you and I am sorry.

  Arion broke down into tears. He couldn’t hold back the emotions anymore and let them flow. He brought his hands to his armored face and found his left hand still clutching the neurofibers he’d torn from Alieha’s skull. He stared at the fine strands for a long moment, unsure of what to do.

  “Blade Heavy, Blade Lead! Respond now!” Blazer ordered, his tone urgent and serious as it came over both the standard and micomm links.

  Arion’s training took hold and he snapped his head up. Blazer’s beacon shone in his HUD.

  “Come on buddy. Don’t make me lose you too,” Blazer all but begged.

  Arion let the neurofibers go and watched them drift away for a moment. “I’m here. Transmitting beacon.”

  “Thank god. The orb you sent lost you and there’s too much small debris here to get a good track on you.”

  Arion nodded as the plate spun around to reveal the local sun behind him. He’d wondered why the plate had been so warm. The thermal energy combined with his ACHES had masked his thermal signature. He checked his readings. Sure enough his ZKEPs were active and masking his output. He looked back to Alieha and felt the color drain from his face. “I found Alieha. Blazer. She’s… was a biodroid.”

  The buzz of the link went dead, others must have heard as well. “Is she, is she still online?” Blazer asked.

  “No, she’s dead,” Arion replied, unwilling to believe that every bit of her was a machine. “Look B, I’m low on propellant and oxygen. There’s no way I can make it back to the shuttles.”

  “Already on my way with one. Arion. Are you okay?”

  “I’ll tell you later,” Arion replied as the plate spun back around to reveal the running lights of an approaching dropshuttle. He activated the glow strips in his ACHES and turned back to Alieha.

  Her eyes were closed. Once again she looked like she was sleeping. He reached over and lay her hair back against her head and body, no one else needed to see what had happened to her face, not yet.

  The dropshuttle’s engines flared for a moment, illuminating him as it slowed only a few dozen metra away. He looked up as it rotated, the light from the open rear hatch illuminating him and the plate. He sat unmoving as two cadets emerged. He couldn’t even help them as they placed Alieha in the body bag and returned her to the shuttle. He followed after a moment, the orb waiting for him, twittering its sadness the whole way. He understood the warning it had tried to tell him before.

  UCSB DATE: 1003.212

  Main Hold, UCSBTS-27413, System: T-18-E-37

  Exhaustion threatened to drop Blazer to the deck as he carried the tiny remains container into the cold storage cell. For two cycles, while cadets and officers had boarded the transports for the trip home, he and a few others had taken up the grim task of collecting the remains of their fallen. He looked down at the container. They wouldn’t even be able to determine the identity of the remains until they’d made it back to the academy.

  Looking around the cold storage cell, he was surprised not to see Arion there. For the last two cycles he’d stood vigil, watching over the bodies, Alieha’s in particular. Now, he was nowhere to be seen. Marda and the other medic must have finally sedated him. He hadn’t slept or eaten that Blazer knew of.

  Blazer set the container amongst the others on the cart beside Alieha’s. He looked down at the body bags. He still couldn’t accept that she’d been a biodroid. He wasn’t sure which thought was worse, that the cadre knew and hadn’t told them, or that they hand’t.

  The door to the cold cell opened again and Blazer turned to find Marda walking in. “Where is he?” Blazer asked, indicating the empty room.

  Marda shivered and walked in, even the thermal garment she was wearing unable to hold back the cold. “He left a while ago,” she replied as the ice crystals in the air around them began drifting towards the floor, her hair following suit. “Are we underway?”

  Blazer nodded. “I think we found what we could of…”

  “I’m surprised you found anything,” Marda replied and moved in close to hug her husband.

  Blazer held her close and looked around the room again. “Did they all…?”

  “None of them linger. They all passed beyond,” she replied and looked over at Alieha. “I always suspected something about her but I had no idea.”

  “I doubt any of us did, maybe that was the point. Could Confed be developing some kind of infiltration droid?”

  Marda shook her head. “No, that would be a clear violation of the Cynial Accords. I mean she was combat trained and she,” Marda looked over at Alieha. “she killed. There’s no other way to say it. Alieha sacrificed herself to kill those Gorvian, taking the lives of sentients. If the Synthetic Sentients found out...”

  “They already know,” a new voice offered.

  Blazer and Marda both looked up to see Tadeh Qudas entering the cold cell with Que Dee, their personnel robot in tow.

  “Sir. If the Synthetics knew that Confed had developed an AI as sophisticated as Alieha, they’d declare war again,” Marda declared.

  “The last war with the synthetics threatened all biological sentient life. Why would Confed risk it?” Blazer asked.

  “It is because we deemed it necessary,” Que Dee responded and hovered over to Alieha. “We have been in hiding for far too long. The Cynial Accords were meant to give us time to learn, to adapt, to become more than we are. Yet we have come to an impasse.”

  Blazer looked to Tadeh Qudas. “Sir, why is Que Dee acting this way?”

  “Que Dee is a Synthetic Sentient.”

  Blazer always wondered what absolute zero would feel like, and by the ice in his veins, he felt very close to it. “What? You can’t be serious!”

  “He is dead serious,” Que Dee responded. “About ten annura ago, a synth ship left the Cynial Expanse and approached the Confederation. We’d advanced as far as we could without biological intervention. We had come to abandon all thoughts of aggression towards biologics. We also realized that without coming to truly understand your kind, we could advance no further.”

  Marda took a step towards Que Dee and Alieha. “So you helped the Confederation develop biodroids like Alieha?”

  Que Dee bobbed up and down in response. “We’d been observing Confed and Federation broadcasts for some time. The development of biodroids over the last century intrigued us. But you only ever used them to fabricate replacement limbs or organs. Per the treaty, you never made one that could pass for a living being. The sex dolls come close. Why any sentient would chose to waste precious reproductive resources on such a machine, or for pure pleasure, is beyond us.”

  “That still doesn’t explain why?” Marda implored.

  Que Dee turned to her. “In order to bridge the gap between our kinds, we needed to become more like you. Alieha and her sisters were our first attempt. With the help of Confed scientists we replicated the brain of a young woman and built copies of her. Despite what the old vids might say, we want only peace. It is felt that with the use of biological android bodies, we might be able to achieve just that.”

  “But why allow Alieha to enter the Space Forces?” Blazer asked. “You had to know that she’d be given combat training.”

  Tadeh Qudas walked up to the body of Officer Marmeh. “The agreement was that we would treat them the same as we do any other sentient. We would give them the same rights and see how they progressed. More synths like Que Dee followed the initial group and observed the other Aliehas.

  “It provides us with invaluable data for the next generation of biodroids, which will include the Vicaron core programming.”

  Marda gasped. “The artificial sentience core that created you? Confed agreed to destroy all copies!”

  “And we have maintained them. Still, Alieha’s willingness to kill these Gorvians is a concern.”

  “Why tell us this?” Blazer asked. “Is there another biodroid like Alieha amongst us?”

  Tadeh Qudas shook his head. “No. Alieha and her sisters are the only ones in existence. We tell you this because it was her last wish to tell you and your team the truth. In addition, Que Dee has requested permanent assignment to your team, as an observer.”

  Marda turned back to Que Dee. “Why? Why us?”

  “Just as Alieha did, I have developed a fondness for this team. Perhaps it was my examination of her neural structure. It is possible that it imparted some of her processes onto me. Whatever the reason…”

  “So she knew,” Arion declared from the open hatch. “She knew what she was and never told us.”

  Tadeh Qudas spun about. “How long have you been standing there, cadet?”

  “Long enough... Ever since Marda activated her micomm with a private link.”

  “Alieha did not lie to you, cadet,” Que Dee responded. “We implanted code into her that prevented her from revealing the truth, to anyone. Beyond that and the prohibitions against taking life hardcoded into her, we made no other restrictions. Her ability to convey real emotions, to declare her love, that was all her own doing, her own architecture. We find that most curious.”

  “Curious… Curious!!!? You find it curious that she led me on for so long, that she…”

  “Arion wait!” Marda cried out. “Alieha did love you, didn’t you hear? Whatever her origins, she had, or had developed, the ability to feel love. Her feelings were as genuine as any other persons’. Whether those feelings were brought about by chemicals, electrons, or a soul, it doesn’t matter. She loved you because of who she was, not some program.

  “In addition, in the data she uploaded to her ship’s computer before she crashed we found another curious anomaly. She indicated that she saw, and interacted with, an orb.”

  Even Arion’s eyes went wide at that statement. “What? How? Were her eyes set to see the quantum energy signatures or something?”

  “No,” Que Dee replied. “Her eyes were no different than any other biodroid eye, yet she was able to perceive the orb.”

  Blazer looked to Marda as she and Arion locked eyes. “Does that mean?”

  “I think so,” she replied. “Even if for only a moment…”

  “Machines don’t have souls,” Arion whispered. “She couldn’t have. The orb, it had to have let her see it.”

  “Arion. I don’t know, but couldn’t it be possible?” Marda asked.

  “No!” he roared. “It can’t be possible! Because if she did have a soul then I murdered her!”

  The room went silent as everyone continued to look at Arion.

  “When I found Alieha. She was still active.”

  “Alive,” Que Dee corrected him.

  “Alive,” he said, inhaling sharply. “Her skull was caved in, her face mangled, but she was still alive, still holding on. Her brain, it was leaking out all over, the neurofibers crushed, cracked, and freezing.”

  “She would have been in agony,” Que Dee commented. “What did you do?”

  “I did what she begged me to do. I smashed her brain to bits. I murdered her!”

  Tadeh Qudas approached Arion. In a gesture that seemed too alien to exist, he reached out to hold his shoulder, offering comfort to the younger man. “Arion. You did not murder her. You did as you were trained. You ended the pain of a fellow soldier; gave them a merciful death on the battlefield. You acted as a Telshin would.”

  Blazer couldn’t even attempt to form words as he watched the display.

  “You showed the greatest of courage. I doubt that any of the other searchers could have done what you did. They would have brought her shattered remains back. I doubt that she could ever have been rebuilt. The time spent trying would have been Sheol. torture beyond all others.”