The Android and the Thief Read online

  The Android and the Thief

  By Wendy Rathbone

  Will love set them free—or seal their fate?

  In the sixty-seventh century, Trev, a master thief and computer hacker, and Khim, a vat-grown human android, reluctantly share a cell in a floating space prison called Steering Star. Trev is there as part of an arrangement that might finally free him from his father’s control. Khim, formerly a combat android, snaps when he is sold into the pleasure trade and murders one of the men who sexually assaults him. At first they are at odds, but despite secrets and their dark pasts, they form a pact—first to survive the prison, and then to escape it.

  But independence remains elusive, and falling in love comes with its own challenges. Trev’s father, Dante, a powerful underworld figure with sweeping influence throughout the galaxy, maintains control over their lives that seems stronger than any prison security system, and he seeks to keep them apart. Trev and Khim must plan another, more complex escape, and this time make sure they are well beyond the law as well as Dante’s reach.

  Table of Contents

  Blurb

  Dedication

  Definition

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  By Wendy Rathbone

  Visit Dreamspinner Press

  Copyright

  For Della, the love of my life.

  Android: in the sixty-seventh century, a popular but often derogatory (and incorrect) term used to label designer vat-grown humans who are born adult.

  Chapter One

  TREV LET the cascading liquid from the pink waterfall flow over his full bodysuit. The neon waterfall was the main decorative feature of the museum’s interior and his only means for navigating from floor to floor to avoid the laser traps and heat sensors.

  The material of his suit was lined with sensors that absorbed the dampness and made him invisible as he climbed up fake, jutting rocks to the museum’s third floor. So far he’d avoided all security detection.

  It was the middle of the night in Fire Town. The museum sat in the center of the floating city’s main cloud. Getting in unseen had been a peach. Back at his flier, parked at the end of the street, he’d drenched himself from head to toe. But the time it took getting to the side entrance and breaking in allowed his suit to dry out too much to avoid detection for long. The waterfall solved that problem. Now, climbing the waterfall forced him to rely on all his talents. He could perform flips and wide leaps, scamper across narrow ledges at great heights, fit into tiny ducts, and run soundlessly down streets or dark corridors without getting winded. Climbing this wall should have been easy, but the rocks were slick with a green, alien algae he had not accounted for. He’d assumed this palace of knowledge that catered to the rich was better maintained. He’d been wrong.

  The comm on his wrist chimed underneath the seals of his suit. He ignored it. Set on low, it wouldn’t trip any sensors, but it was annoying him. “Breq, leave me alone,” he muttered softly to himself. He should have left the comm in the flier.

  “Fuck.” His left foot slipped. He’d left his grav-boosters behind; they would’ve fucked up the security system big-time. For this job he relied on experience and physical strength alone.

  He grabbed frantically at an emerald-tinged rock just above his head, fingers sliding along its surface, heart rate increasing a fraction as he tried not to flail. His right foot still had a pretty good purchase, and his right hand was half-pressed into a crack between two rocks. He took a slow breath, accidentally let a little neon water into his mouth, and sputtered. It tasted of metal and scum, lichen, and—unexpectedly—honey. That would not do.

  He focused, clinging to the wet wall as a continual cascade the color of party champagne poured onto his shoulders and head, clumping his dark bangs into his eyes where they had escaped his tight hood.

  Take it slow, he prompted himself. His fingers discovered a bump in the rock and closed over it. He lifted his left foot and felt along the wall for another crack, found it, and rebalanced. He had about fifteen feet to go.

  Slowly Trev crawled up the soaked rocks and through the pouring falls until he landed on the third floor, dripping thin puddles the sensors would ignore. He’d found the building’s vulnerability to water when he’d studied the security system and its layouts, discovering that two years ago the building had flooded due to a maintenance oversight and the alarms had not gone off. The following morning, workers had opened the doors to a mess. A report had been filed and repairs made, but the system had not been updated to tag the encroachment of water as a threat, and the cascade of the waterfall left the sensors unaffected. Obviously the program ignored the motion of water. An oversight, to be sure, and one Trev enjoyed exploiting tonight.

  He had calculated the air temperature and humidity, knowing he had just under three minutes before his suit and its embedded sensors began to dry and his invisibility to the museum’s security system failed. He had plenty of time.

  He knew exactly where he was heading. Aisle 3, Case 2.

  He moved with practiced stealth past arching alcoves containing innumerable treasures. The museum’s lighting made everything clearly visible. He navigated with ease.

  Case 2’s lock did not have an alarm, but there was one hidden inside, underneath the velvet. The object inside was worth a lot, but for some reason extra alarms had not been installed. It took him about ten seconds to pick the lock, and another ten to slip a sensor neutralizer under the artifact so he could lift it out.

  The item was too fragile to be handled or exposed to air. Encased in seamless crystal, it was something to look at but never touch, for fear it would crumble to instant dust.

  Through the transparent casing, Trev could see it clearly. He smiled, blinking at its beauty. It was an imperfect white page, slightly yellowed, the fading artwork of a mushroom behind an ascending rocket. And four beautiful words. The Machineries of Joy. The real-book he’d been looking for to complete his collection.

  “I’ll be the antihero of the Bradbury cults,” he whispered to himself on the dry air.

  When the museum found this one missing, they’d search the black markets for a while but never find it. One of hundreds of items he’d stolen—most for the Damicos, his adopted family, who sold them at great profit—but this one he was taking for himself, and he would never part with it.

  He glanced around. This particular alcove was filled with Bradburys, but this was the one he wanted. With not even a twinge of conscience, he put the real-book in a protective pouch at his waist, turned, and headed back for his climb down the waterfall.

  Trev could not help the satisfied feeling he got at the weight in the pouch rubbing the edge of his hip. It made his climb down, although more precarious than going u
p, easier and quicker.

  He slipped only once as the pink waters lashed him, dropped the last three feet to the pool, and waded out of the shallows and into the foyer of the lobby.

  Just then the air turned red. An alarm crowed, shocking him. He froze. Somewhere, somehow, he’d miscalculated.

  The orange glow at the front doors, only thirty feet away, was a sign that the lasers were coming back online.

  Trained to perfection, his body shed the shock and flew into a sprint. As he ran, he reached into another pouch and pulled out a candle tube, illegal on nine hundred worlds. He aimed it at the glass doors, fingers flashing over the code buttons to unlock it, and pressed the diamond-shaped trigger. The doors shattered and he ran through them, his feet crunching broken glass, and never looked back.

  The streets of the floating city were wet, the clouds low and humming, backlit in gold from late-night air traffic. Some of that traffic would already be heading his way.

  The walkway, striped in rainbow neon from the advertising screens mounted on just about every building, was clear. The demisters in the gutters kept the fog at bay. Trev was fast and light on his feet, but out here he stood out like a beacon. He used his candle to shoot at the demisters, fog rolling up behind him as he ran. Cameras would be recording. His programming talents were vast, but he couldn’t immobilize them all, so he pulled his hood down over his face and kept going, a thief on the run, a ghost in the mist.

  TREV HAD left his flier parked at the city’s edge, near the wall and its force field that kept people from walking off the island platform and falling to the planet below. As soon as he got inside, the doors closed down around him and the comm on the dash went off with a soft clang.

  “Breq. Fuck.” He didn’t answer but instead concentrated on building power for a straight-up takeoff.

  Screaming alarms blared behind him; lights glittered from incoming police vehicles. He ignored them.

  Thirty seconds to full power. It was an eternity. But finally the flier responded. He shot up through the fog and was out of the clouds and into clear skies. Traffic glittered above him. He edged into its glowing stream, glancing through the floor windows to see if anyone followed. Nothing.

  The flier spoke. “Three hundred miles to destination.”

  “Thank you. Lock on for 250 mph.”

  “Cleared.” The system recited an altitude setting.

  The car shot up again and forward, bypassing all local traffic.

  It would take a little over an hour to reach home. Trev sighed, pulling off his hood and combing his fingers through his wet bangs.

  The comm message still blinked on the dash. He switched it on.

  Breq’s face appeared on a screen, steel-gray eyes darting. “Trev, you’re late. You’re going to miss early breakfast if you don’t get here within an hour.”

  “I don’t usually eat breakfast. Besides, it’s the middle of the night. I have a life, you know.”

  His oldest brother’s face twisted a little. At thirty-two, with his trim, tall physique and thick hair, Breq could have been good-looking, but his features were too hard. “You? With a lover?”

  “One of many. I have a harem.”

  Breq rolled his eyes. “Sure, Trev. A harem of books. And not a one of them offering even a bit of decent porn.”

  “You went through my stuff?”

  Breq laughed. “The breakfast and the meeting’s been set for four. Just before dawn. Be there, or Dad will have your hide.”

  “So that’s why you called? To remind me of the meeting?”

  “That, and to bother you in the middle of the night.”

  “Yeah. You’re annoying as hell. There, you win.”

  “What else are big brothers for?” At that, Breq leaned forward and ended the transmission.

  Trev leaned back and closed his eyes. Breq, their father, even the book in his pouch—none of it mattered, really. It was all a game, just biding his time, because in two days he’d be gone anyway.

  His hand trembled against the pouch and his prize, still fastened securely to his hip. He tried to draw some comfort from the object, as if it were a good-luck totem telling him all would be well. But ahead of him, all he could see was darkness for a long way. His throat threatened to close up. His fingers curled into fists.

  The flier leaped closer to the stars.

  TREV FLIPPED the autopilot off and took the flier’s controls. He loved this part of the approach and wanted to relish it one last time, for after tomorrow he would no longer live there.

  The Damico floating mansion came into view, first no more than a star’s-breadth of light, then growing pearlescent and tender upon the dark as Trev approached. Its massive triangular structure gave off an opal-blue glimmering against the early-morning darkness, set against a backdrop of mist, puffy clouds, and two quarter-moons.

  The architecture itself belonged in a museum. Designed by artisans from Lyric Prime, one point of the upside-down triangle sat upon fifty acres of floating earth. It was surrounded by a thickly columned porch painted white, the sides overflowing with blue and green vines sparked with white flowers. The surrounding landscape consisted of lush gardens, dense, grassy fields of high-flowing willows, and redwoods nearly as tall as the mansion itself.

  From this distance, Trev could see the edges of the land, like cliffs dropping off to nothing but air and cumulus. Beneath that, massive machines kept the island afloat in the sky. He maneuvered around back, slow and precise, to view the inner-lit, sculptured waterfalls surrounded by flowering creepers—honey-yellow, sensitive red. The water rushed and splashed in white froth over the uneven edge of the land and into the air, only to vanish one hundred feet out. Invisible force fields caught it up and recycled it to the top of the falls again like overwrought fairy magic. The falling water was the color of mercury.

  It was 4:00 a.m., but as usual for the Damicos, the houselights were all on, as white as snow, making the scenery all the more glamorous and wavery.

  Trev flew into the massive underground garage and parked beside twenty other fliers, most of them designer models bigger than his own. He entered the mansion through the underground portal, a round door made entirely of dichroic glass that drew up as embedded electronics sensed his approach and scanned him to confirm his identity.

  An androgynous voice intoned, “Welcome home, Master Trevor.”

  To his right was an elevator, to his left the winding steps. He had exerted himself enough tonight, so he took the elevator to the topmost, widest level of the mansion where his father’s meeting rooms and the main dining hall lay.

  In the elevator, Trev combed his fingers through his feathery dark hair. He’d changed in the flier en route, and now wore a blue silk suit, white shirt, and gold tie. He’d locked the Bradbury in the safe of his flier, planning to retrieve it later and hide it in his room.

  The doors opened onto a foyer that led to the dining room. Everything dripped luxury and wealth. The foyer itself was designed like a king’s antechamber, with paintings on the ceilings and marble and crystal sculptures in every nook and cranny. All the doorways were framed in gold, carved with intricate floral designs. But enough was never enough for the Damico family, who owned interests in ten planets and had investments, mostly shady and uninteresting to Trev, in a hundred more.

  Dante Damico lorded over it all and held every trust, corporation, and investment close to the vest. He doled out salaries and occasional gifts to his sons and daughters. He had no wife and no lover. With his extreme ability to control all around him, Dante was like a god.

  Trevor was the youngest son, adopted at the age of two but treated by Dante the same as all his children—with a strict hand and a cold heart. Trev had received the best education money could buy, fine food, clothes, and toys. But as payment for all of that, he’d been indoctrinated into the criminal side of the family. Because of his willowy frame and acrobatic abilities, they put his aptitudes for overriding computer security programs and performing physical thef
t to good use. He could hack complex security systems, could squeeze into tight spaces, could run like a gazelle.

  As he stepped into the dining hall, he saw his family just finishing up their early breakfast. They were night owls, so technically it was dinner. Before noon they would all sleep until the night woke them again for darker deeds.

  Three sisters and three brothers all sat facing each other. Dante was at the head of the table. A half-dozen scurrying servants—real people, not robots—entered and exited, bringing plates, taking plates away, refilling wine goblets.

  Dante did not look up as Trev entered. He merely picked up his wineglass and raised it in his direction. “Nice of you to finally join us, Trevor,” he said.

  Breq, in the seat closest to their father, smothered a laugh with the back of his hand. No one else seemed to even hear or care that Trev had just come in.

  Trev hurried over to his seat beside his next-up brother, Blair, the second-best fighter in the family. The only person to ever beat Blair in hand-to-hand was their sister Sonye. Those two were their father’s bodyguards, and rarely did Dante go anywhere without them.

  “You’re in time for the cake,” Dante said. He turned to the servant doling it out. “Make sure the biggest piece goes to him, the corner piece with the roses.”

  Trev clenched his fists in his lap. The thrill of his personal caper was fading. The Bradbury was an astonishing possession, but little made up for the cloying control Dante held over the entire household, including all his adult children. Dante knew he hated cake, and frosting most of all.

  “So, Trevor, where were you tonight?” Dante asked.

  Trev had no life to speak of, save thieving and working for his father, which also entailed thieving. “Just out,” he murmured.

  Breq piped up with a smirk. “He has a lover.”

  His oldest sister, Rory, said, “Trev does? Really?”

  Sonye squirmed in her chair, her deadly hands looking so gentle and slim folded over the table beside her plate of cake. “I don’t believe it. He’s turned down every one of my friends, even the ungendered ones.”