9.19 – Guillotine Preparation

238 - Guillotine Preparation

The underground was livelier than the surface had any business being, and warmer too. Below Bijou's cold, rain-soaked streets, a whole civilization of robots had taken root, built into the forgotten metro tunnels and the abandoned sewage system, transformed by time and necessity into something that functioned as its own city.

The blue rock walls and concrete floors ran warm with installed lighting, robots moving through the corridors without any of the collisions you'd expect from spaces that weren't designed for foot traffic. The old rail tracks were mostly gone, actively repurposed to rebuild units that the Navy Unit and Tau's copies had been pulling off the streets above.

Sirius moved through the rooms in steady progress, passing through most of her domain one section at a time. Eve followed in wide, unhurried steps, a cluster of screens trailing her face as she ran continuous security sweeps across the tunnel system.

They entered a room where large machinery lined the walls from floor to ceiling, cables extending outward from it into the wider network. Robots bowed as Sirius passed them before snapping immediately back to work. OverDose ran this unit.

"Hello." Sirius's face stayed as still as it always did, only her white eyes moving from face to face across the room. "I can see you're keeping the jamming facility running. Excellent work, we need it more now than we did before, unfortunately."

OverDose closed her screen and crossed to the queen and Eve.

"Thank ya for coming to check on us personally, Big Q." A quick bow. "Though honestly, ya don't need to come down here yarself. Every bit of energy you have should be saved for the mission tomorrow. Can I ask, why the increased need for the facility right now?"

Eve answered in her flat mechanical register. "Elysium has been attacked by operatives working under our direction inside the country. They will reach the logical conclusion: Black Voltage is responsible. Probability: ninety-nine percent, conditional on Captain 02 being actively embedded with them. She has prior exposure to our operational style and will make the identification."

"I see!" OverDose nodded quickly. "So we need double the output." She spun toward the workers. "Did everyone hear that? Double coverage—now, Boys. Chop, chop."

Two sharp claps in time with the words. She turned back.

"But Big Q, can we actually sustain this without Elysium's support? A significant portion of what's running down here originally came from them."

Sirius reached up and held OverDose's face in both hands, her space-dark palms moving gently against the white plastic. "Do. Not. Worry. I know precisely what I'm doing. I'm not going to let some dark lord across the continent run us as a double agent indefinitely."

She caught the blue glow starting to build inside OverDose's cat ears. "I will not let anyone dismantle what we've built here. All right?"

"All right!" OverDose nodded hard. Then, "but please be careful tomorrow. I won't survive if something happens to ya."

"You will, and so will I." The stars in Sirius's interior brightened briefly, shifting as she laughed, the light in her chest moving like a visualizer tracking sound. "Have you forgotten that I can be revived? I'm the same as anyone else in this room, a walking SSD with a purpose."

"Stop reducing yarself to that!" OverDose took several steps back and folded her arms. "Ya need to have more value for yarself. Honestly, yar humility is starting to irritate me."

Eve's screen closed. "This trait accounts for eighty-four percent of our population's recorded approval of her. The origin of the trait is also documented—Human Assist Corp—"

Sirius raised one hand. Every robot in the room stopped working and turned toward her. She registered the silence immediately. "No! Please, keep going, I was only asking Eve to stop mentioning that particular incident. I apologize for the interruption. I should move on, I only seem to make people uncomfortable when I stay too long in one place."

OverDose shook her head slowly. "Big Q…"

"I'm sorry—"

"Queen." OverDose cut through it. "Stop apologizing. Ya haven't done anything." She laughed briefly, her neon smile running full blue, then looked at Eve. "Sis, can ya keep an eye on her? She's too gentle for her own good. I still wonder how she's going to handle tomorrow."

"I will handle it." Sirius closed her hands, and the interior of her frame shifted, the stars going deeper, the blue turning toward pitch black, the purple blooming in the spaces between. "I have never let my people down. I won't start tomorrow. I'm going there, and I'm putting an end to 43."

Eve raised one hand over her eyes. "Critical observation: too gentle, even in the act of making threats."

"Agreed." OverDose turned back to her terminal. "Eve, walk me through the full plan for tomorrow after the meeting wraps. I won't make it to the briefing in time." She saluted the queen. "Safe trip to the meeting room, Big Q."

Sirius laughed—soft, brief, only her eyes closing while the rest of her face stayed in its usual stillness. "Thank you. I may have to make saluting a formal requirement. There's something professional about a clean salute."

Eve had already opened a call to the unit leaders. "New standing order from the queen, a proper military salute is required when meeting her directly. This order comes from the queen."

The entire video call saluted in unison.

Sirius let her head drop. The stars in her frame dimmed. "That was a joke. Why can't we return to the days when you laughed at them instead of implementing them?"

Eve reopened the call. "New standing order: laugh at every—"

Sirius reached in and ended the call herself. "Eve. You need an update." She exhaled the gesture rather than the substance of a breath, and moved to the doorway. "Come on, let's check the remaining sections on the way to the meeting room and let OverDose actually get back to work."

"Queen, please—" OverDose said, as she'd already turned back to her workstation and started typing.

Both of them laughed at that, waved at her from the door, and left.

They moved through the wider corridors toward the meeting room, everyone stepping aside and bowing as Sirius passed. She kept her voice low as they walked.

"Eve, keep close watch on our new guest for me. Hex's proxy frame is being rebuilt, but that red flying drone, the one that looks like a hovering red eye, is actually him operating externally. I can't track it constantly, but you can."

"Logged as critical priority." Eve's eyes briefly flared white. "Correction for accuracy: I've been tracking the target since the moment he arrived at the base. He has not left Reflex's side except for brief intervals when he checks on the frame reconstruction progress. I have a comment, if permitted."

"Of course. And stop asking permission, I mean it."

"Registered."

A small pause.

"The comment: the engineering architecture of Hex's frame is extraordinary. Whoever designed it is someone we should be trying to bring into this organization. The frame is light enough that the reconstruction team reached ninety-five percent completion in a matter of days. And it's structurally capable of competing with mech-class units. Neither of those things should be possible simultaneously."

"That's good to hear, Hex is our primary front-line asset for tomorrow." Sirius kept walking as the aesthetic of the corridor shifted around them, the raw tunnel walls giving way to something more finished, the lighting warmer and more intentional. "Though—"

"Though?"

"His creator is the same person behind Reflex and the E-UNIT." She paused at a set of frosted double glass doors, thick enough to hold sound inside. "I've read everything there is on him. Nicholas Rivera. Exceptional, by any measure." She looked at the doors. "And dead. We won't be recruiting him. But we have another target approaching, so that problem stays where it is."

She pushed the doors open and stopped in the threshold. "Watch Hex for me. I have a meeting with Reflex. I'll brief you once it's done."

"Registered." Eve's tone shifted downward, the closest she came to anything like concern. "Please be careful in there."

"He won't do anything." Sirius stepped through and let the doors close on their own.

The room was spare. White marble walls that matched the throne room in finish if not in scale, red carpet, a circular floating table with hovering chairs arranged around it. The lighting was a single continuous strip recessed near the ceiling, with a handful of screens on the wall running live feeds.

Sirius took a chair. Across the table from her, Reflex had two screens open, one showing the streets of Bijou above them in real time, the other running live reports from Black Voltage operatives currently deployed in the city.

He raised his head to look at her when she sat.

She opened a screen and pushed it to the center between them. "We're ready on our end. There are a few details left to align before we can engage the G-Bots and the Navy Unit at the same time, and we still need your foresight on the planning. We may also need you present physically."

Reflex nodded once.