"It's Grid 4-Y, right on the outskirts of EC space."

"That's the problem, Liam.  The Third Fleet is stationed in 4-Z.  That's a five hour jump.  Five hours to run the entire operation!  If everyone was military trained and we spent weeks drilling, we'd still be hard pressed to pull this off.  This can't be a smash & grab kind of mission."

"I know that, Patricia."  Liam took a deep breath.  "With proper intel, I think we can pull this off."

"Need I remind you it's an EC black ops site.  These won't be Pale Garden troopers you can just shoot.  These will be Earth Conglomerate soldiers, with lives and families.  It adds a whole new level of complexity to the equation."

"I'm aware of the added risk."

"Then why are you t-"

"BECAUSE HE'S OBSESSED!"

Taylor-06 looked up from the lab counter where she was prepping beakers and test tubes.  Scott was glaring across the room at Patricia and Liam.  The two were analyzing data on their datapads.  He, on the other hand, sat on his infirmary bed brooding.  Dr. Ho had confined him to the infirmary after he was caught sneaking into the station gym for the second time.  The restrictions on his movement did nothing to improve his mood.

"I'm not obsessed."  Liam stood up and stretched.  "We found a list of twenty Earth Conglomerate government projects on that Pale Garden database.  This is the only project site we can find that isn't deep in the heart of EC space."

"Liam, I'm not one of the fools you've been bossing around on this tub.  You don't care which site we hit, you just want the Pale Garden to react."

"We need them to react.  The point of this is to gauge how they handle our interference and to determine their connection to these government programs."

"Did he say, say, say programs?" asked Thing 1.

"I believe he did, did, did!" responded Thing 2.

The two constructs rose out of their alcove beside the supply cabinet, and trotted over to Liam's side.  They were five foot tall series 2s, metal chassis with humanoid chrome heads.  The numbers 1 and 2 had been stenciled on their chest plates.

"Did, did, did you need our assistance, operator?"

"We're here to help!"

"Pepper, why are they here?" Scott groaned.  He never seemed to like them.

"I'm working on my software integration drive."

"I thought you were here to take a blood sample."

"I'm here to do that too.  I'm sure you've heard of multitasking, Scooter."

"Don't call me that," he growled.  "Dr. Ho said I could leave once you took your blood.  I've waited patiently for you to poke and prod me like everyone's been doing for the last two days, but no.  Shorty over here walks in and the two of you decide to have an impromptu strategy session.  Now you have these damned robots dancing around.  IT'S DRIVING ME CRAZY!"

A knock brought everyone's attention to the transparent wall separating Scott's room from the rest of the infirmary.  Dr. Rodriguez waved and gestured towards the uncomfortable faces around him.  Scott made a gesture of his own, one inappropriate and rude.  The doctor shook his head and went back to tending his patients.  He'd already voiced his eagerness to get Scott out of his work space.

"Are you done making a scene?"  Patricia tapped her datapad and the transparent walls grew opaque, providing a bit of privacy.  "Thing 1, Thing 2, and Taylor-06 are going to be assisting me.  If things work out they can help the infirmary staff during critical medical situations."

"I thought they were helpdesk programs," Liam began.

The two constructs started dancing in a circle around him.

"Ummm, they are distracting, how did they get inside these constructs shells?"

"My Integration Drives already contain the basic code for a rudimentary construct thought matrix.  Insert one of my programs," Thing 1 and 2 danced over to Patricia, "and we have a virtual AI."

"This is what I mean when I say useless science."

The fur on Patricia's neck bristled.  "What have I told you about using that phase!"

Liam walked over to the counter while the two felarnians argued.  He was wearing a pair of stained maintenance coveralls, and a bandanna over his hair.  He placed his datapad away from the sterile beakers and leaned against the wall.  Machine oil stained his face, scuff marks marred his boots.  He pulled out one of his beloved cigars.

"You can't smoke..."  Watching Liam's eyebrow raise made Taylor's circuit's quicken.  "There's no smoking in this sector."

"Don't worry.  I'm not gonna smoke it."

Of course he wasn't.  Smoking was only allowed on Landing Bay 1.  It was his rule.

"Right.  Sorry. Were you working with maintenance today?"  She'd memorized his schedule, knew where every member of the council and their direct reports should be throughout the work week.

"Yeah.  Did an inspection with Ticker then took a tour of the power reactor."  He smiled, and moved a strand of hair from her face.  "I like the new color is this aquamarine?"

"Yes... do you really like it?"

He smirked, and Taylor-06 turned away to hide the darkening of her cheeks.  She caught a glimpse of her own reflection in the mirror above the station.  Her lipstick, irises, eyeshadow had all shifted to match her hair.  She looked down at her hand, and even her fingernails were gradually changing to a teal pigment.  She began to walk away and he took her hand.

"It's alright.  I was reading a user manual on the wide-net, and it said proper calibration could take weeks."  The warmth of his hand around hers was soothing.  "I think you look be-"

"FINE!" Scott shouted.  "Taylor-06 and your useless robots can help.  Can we get this over with?"

Taylor-06 shook off Liam's grip, and grabbed the tray of test tubes and the eco-jar she'd prepared.  She brought the tray over to the bed where Thing 1 loaded a tube into a hypogun.  Thing 2 proceeded to talk Scott through the procedure.

"Shut up already."

Taylor-06 looked back at Liam, but he was already walking towards the door.  He smiled and nodded, but some of the warmth had left his face.  She wanted to run over to him, to ask him to finish what he was saying, but it felt too late.

"Patient, please stay, stay, stay still."

"Please do something about that stutter."

"It isn't a stutter," Patricia corrected.  "There's some feedback between the integration drives and the programs.  I'll fix it after I get my samples."

"Why do you need my blood again.  You have a gallon stored away somewhere."

"More like 1.5 quarts."  Patricia accepted the hypogun from Thing 1 and ran her fingers over the hairless patch of Scott's back.  "Taylor-06, I need the siphon hose attached to the eco-jar."

Taylor-06 nodded, hurried across the room to the counter, and grabbed the hose from the sterilization tray.  She spied Liam speaking to Dr. Rodriguez through the glass pane of the door.  In his coveralls he reminded her even more of her clone friend, her Alan.

"The device that blasted you disrupted the bond between your blood and the R.Nano, causing your body to violently reject the affected machines.  It also repelled the remaining unaffected nano.  That's why you couldn't heal."

Taylor-06 brought over and attached the hose.

"The effects have gradually diminished, but at the moment the nano in your blood is still trying to reintegrate.  This might be my only chance to snatch living samples of the R.Nano that aren't melded with your blood."  Patricia pulled the trigger on the hypogun.  Two streams poured into the test tube, one the rich amber of Felarnian blood, and the other a watery silver.  "With the pure nano I might be able to find a cure..."

RED ALERT! RED ALERT! ALL HANDS BRACE FOR MULTIPLE IMPACTS!

Taylor-06 looked up from her work as claxons sounded throughout the infirmary.  Scott swore, and grabbed for his clothes folded on a chair beside his bed.  Patricia rushed for her datapad and typed furiously one-handed, the other clutched the hypogun.  Taylor-06 gathered Thing 1 and 2, and guided them to the charging alcove.  She strapped them in place, while Scott pulled on his pants.

"Nash, what's happening?"

"We're still having trouble with the long range sensors, but best we can tell a small ship or large satellite exploded.  The debris is inbound."

"I told Smith to get that fixed," Patricia growled.  "What's the ETA?"

"We're already taking damage.  Multiple hits on decks A, B, and C!"

Something whizzed through the room leaving a fist sized smoking hole in its wake.  Taylor-06 went for cover as more of the projectiles cut through the infirmary.  Screams from the next room nipped at her artificial nerves.  Fear washed through her circuits, but her combat training overrode the crippling emotion.  Dr. Ho had spent hours helping Taylor-06 turn her call to war, hardwired by the machines who created her, into a call to aid.  Through the fear she rushed to the portable first-aid kit, and ran towards the cries for assistance.

In the main infirmary smoke rose from a number of burning beds and a pile of slagged diagnostic machines.  Liam and Dr. Rodriguez were attacking the flames with fire suppressors.  The other infirmary staff scrambled about.  Taylor-06 stepped over a body, blackened and bleeding.  She checked for a pulse, but found nothing.  Nearby, a child cried.  His face was soot stained, his clothes scorched.

"Everyone who can walk, help someone who can't!  We're evacuating the infirmary!" Liam's voice carried across the medical facility.

His instructions seemed to rally the frazzled medical staff.  Orderlies coordinated with those able-bodied patients and started getting the infirm out.  Taylor-06 helped an older man on unsure feet work his way around the fire Dr. Rodriguez struggled to keep under control.  Scott moved past her carrying a patient on either shoulder.  Liam continued to put out blazes as he shouted orders and words of encouragement.

In the hall, the people of the station worked together to manage the ill.  Smoke poured out from the sliding infirmary doors as well as the holes in the walls and ceilings.  The debris had hit at an angle which left the bulkheads and infrastructure looking chewed up by rustmites.  The infirmary sat in the middle of deck B.  For the damage to be so bad the shields had to have failed.  The station didn't have the armor plating needed to withstand such a barrage.

Taylor-06 rushed back inside to help with the evacuation and caught sight of the weeping child.  He hadn't moved, seemingly transfixed by the dead man on the ground.  Taylor-06 went to him, coughing as the building smoke clogged her lungs.  Her cognitive functions grew sluggish.  She deactivated the sensory organs, and instantly felt better.

"Boy, we have to leave.  Give me your hand."

The child gave her no recognition.

"Did you hear me?"  She waved her hand in front of his face.  She put herself between him and the corpse.  "Did you hear me?"

He blinked, and emerged from his trance.

"He... he's dead."

"He is, and we have to leave."

"Okay," he replied after a moment's hesitation.

He reached out for her, and she took his hand.  She looked around.  The infirmary was nearly empty.  Only Dr. Rodriguez remained in her immediate vicinity.  He coughed violently, but continued to attack the blaze.  Taylor-06 did a quick analysis and decided it would be best if he took the child, and she handled containment of the fire.

"Dr. Rodriguez, take this child to safety.  I'll handle th-"

Her heightened hearing detected a hissing sound like gas rushing through a funnel.

"DOCTOR, RUN!"

The series 3 construct was designed to process data on a slow relay comparable to the processing speed of the human mind.  In times of high stress a healthy series three could overclock their processors and function on par with other super thinker AIs.  In those moments the world seemed to slow to a crawl as input was consumed faster than the speed of light.  Taylor-06 watched the world like a gallery of still photos.

The floor crumbled under the pressure as the atmosphere within the ship violently forced its way out.  The pieces ripped away and suddenly a huge chunk of the infirmary dropped out through a gaping breach in the micro-station.  Equipment, beds , and bodies were suddenly weightless and falling.  She watched the look of shock on Dr. Rodriguez's face turn to fear as he was pulled away.

Taylor-06 only had a second to react, but in her hyperthought state seconds were more than enough.  She hugged the child to her, squeezing him hard enough to force the air out of his lungs, and wrapped her limbs around him.  She threw her right arm out, grabbing for any hand hold or purchase even as they plummeted through a field of debris.  Metal and cables tore at her clothes and synthetic skin as she was raked across jagged hunks of the station.

Fear was a chemical cocktail racing through her body.  Decompression was such a rare occurrence on modern ships that most were never trained in proper emergency procedures.  Taylor-06 was a machine, capable of surviving short stints in open space before her synthetic organs malfunctioned.  Even if she deactivated, her consciousness resided in the cognitive chips in her chest.  She could be revived.  Her fear was for others, a strange but not unfamiliar sensation.  Dr. Ho called it compassion.  It was that compassion that made her a terrible soldier of the Neo Mecha Empire.  It was that compassion which made her fear for the humans around her being sucked into space.

She held tight to the boy as she slammed her fingers into every passing surface.  Her fingers ruptured, revealing the metal skeleton within.  The overclocking terminated in a rush of motion.  Suddenly everything was happening in real time.  As space loomed before her, Taylor-06 thought of Stardust, the first human child she'd ever seen.  She regarded the boy within her clutches, and began to squeeze tighter.

Taylor-06 abruptly stopped as pain charged through her circuits.  A shaft of piping jutted through her right bicep.  The bionic musculature held fast, even as the synthetic skin tore away.  She closed her hand around the shaft, fighting random spasms rippling through her fingers.  Taylor-06 and the child dangled out in space, her mangled arm their only lifeline.

She looked up through feet of ravaged space station, and saw a figure approaching.  Through an obscuring green haze, she could make out his maintenance coveralls.  Liam stared forward, eyes blazing blue lights, metal bands framing his face.  He appeared more machine than man.  She was struck by the duality of their existence. One, a human made into a machine, the other, a machine made to function as a human.

He swam to her and wrapped his arms around her.  The green mist enveloped her, and her systems detected breathable air.  The child was unconscious, but his chest took deep desperate breathes.

"The station's experiencing system wide shield failure.  Deflector and Gaiar generators are down," Liam said into her ear.  The R.Nano not only covered him in armor plating, but filled the area around him with a rudimentary Gaiar shield of his own.  "I'm gonna get you back inside.  Brace yourself."

Taylor-06 closed her eyes, which helped her lower her pain receptors.  He perched atop the piece of twisted metal which anchored the piping keeper her from floating off into space.  He drew out a small cutting laser and sawed into the metal.  The piping snapped free of the station, and Liam grabbed hold of her.  He wrapped his arms around her body, cradling her in his arms like a baby.  He bunched his legs beneath him, jumped up towards the infirmary.  They sailed towards the opening where searchlights were already sweeping the void.

They flew up through the floor as the station's generators reactivated.  The green shimmer of the atmospheric shields covered the gap, and Taylor-06 could detect an instant shift in the artificial gravity.  Liam rotated and pushed off the ceiling, sending them bouncing off the infirmary floor.  He took the brunt of the impact as they slammed into the wall.  He lowered her down, and she carefully unfurled from the boy.  He was bruised but alive.

"Thank you," she said, but Liam's attention was directed across the room where Scott and medical personnel attempted to revive Patricia.