#;alix

In which SMC programming takes Dekker for a spin.

“He’s not gonna fall for this. He’s not gonna fall for this.”

Alix’s hands shook along with his voice, but at least he was moving—and doing it as fast as he could. Cross leaned a little harder into the doorway, feeling the reassuring solidity of Analeigha’s bulkhead between his shoulder blades. She was there at his back, so he could keep his gaze ahead, down the dark, emergency-lit corridor.

“They made him broken,” the doctor moaned yet again. This time the phrase warbled from under one of the workbenches. But this time she had more to add. “I stopped them before, but they won. They made him broken. He’s not perfect. He’s not perfect anymore!”

Ezebel edged closer to the older woman to wrap a trembling arm around her shoulders, in as much an attempt for simple comfort as it was to keep the doctor quiet. Alix shot a frown at them both, even as his fingers continued flying through holographic interfaces.

“I believe what Madeline means to say is that he will fall for it.”

The calm voice of the blood priest made everyone stall. He regarded their stares with curiosity and even a shred of amusement. As if their mad scramble to survive the literal killing machine smashing through sealed bulkheads was nothing more than a colorful flashy vid.

“Ian Dekker has lost that which made him the perfect synthetic soldier,” Reaper went on. “His freewill. Ironically, while under SMC control, he will not be the efficient killer they desire. He will walk into traps without consideration because he’s following orders rather than reasoning for himself the best course of action.”

The moment of contemplative silence ended with the shrieking of heavy-plated metal being torn and bent. Cross’s gaze snapped back down the hall, pistol raised once more, gripped and steady in both hands. He was deadly enough with two. Focused on one target, he could put anything down. Anything but…that.

Dekker climbed through the remains of the final security door, expression still shockingly blank. His exposed circuitry glowed hot, purring audibly even from a distance. His eyes shifted, lights tracking over the inky black surface and targeting every heartbeat in the time it took to breathe. But he was still zoned in on the captain.

Cross put another round in his chestplate, but it hardly scuffed the armor. Swallowing, hesitating just a little, he aimed higher. The slug ricocheted off the cyborg’s jaw, tearing synthetic skin to reveal dull metal underneath. Dekker’s head jerked to one side as though he’d taken a light slap across the face. Then he refocused. He took a single, menacing step.

Cross didn’t dare take his eyes from the threat. “Alix…?!”

Alix waved frantically, his other hand still hard at work. “Go!”

Without a word, Cross spun around the bulkhead and took off down the corridor away from his first officer’s entry point. Still adhered to the captain’s biosignature, Dekker stormed after him, picking up speed with every stride. Closing like a heat-seeking missile. 

Alix had never moved faster in his life despite the panic that shook his frame. Fairly punching the last control node, he lurched to the doorway and yanked the loose ceiling plate down, releasing a mess of overloaded and stripped conduits into the cyborg’s path. 

The noise Dekker released was probably involuntary, but it still struck them all as being startlingly human. And painful.

Maddy cried out with him, tried to scramble out from under the table. Reaper caught her arm and Ezebel gripped her waist and the doctor collapsed, letting out the choked sob of a horrified mother. Dekker sank to his knees in fits and starts, still hopelessly tangled in power cording, teeth locked and body vibrating with the full force of Analeigha’s generators running through him.

His head hung low, but as Cross crept back toward their sprung trap, Dekker looked up and focused on him through the pain, his voice synthesizer gone haywire with the overload.

“C-C-Cap-t-t-tain.”

“What? No more ‘Primary Target’? I was just getting used to that.”

"The shock must’ve been strong enough to hit a reset," Alix whispered. He sank to a seat right there on the floor, hands dug into his hair as he gasped for breath. "Shit, that’s…that’s bad. It must’ve fried most of his internals."

Cross took another step closer. Alix already started to protest, citing the danger the cyborg still posed, even in his state, but Cross silenced him with a wave, settling into a crouch in front of the hissing synthetic soldier.

"Feeling better, Sparky?"

“M-My b-body betr-trays m-m-me. You mussssst disman-n-n-tle me—me.”

Cross laughed. His wry smile tinged with concern only at the very edges, almost imperceptible. Almost. “Dismantle? That sounds complicated.”

The soldier didn’t blink. “The b-boy cannnnnn do it.”

Cross’s smile faded several shades, eyebrows coming closer together. Alix swallowed hard, looking between the two like a small child watching parents fight. Except for the fact that everyone involved was remarkably calm. Dekker stared straight back into the captain’s eyes, that familiar determination very clearly Ian and not the programming.

“I…wwill not s-s-stop. Y-You m-must—”

“The only thing I must do, is have a shower after all this is over.” 

Cross stood, holstering his pistol, satisfied to see the cyborg’s pained grit take on a hint of confusion and anger at the captain’s decision to—yet again—ignore advice given. Cross smirked at him, full of mischief, as if they were going to drop in on a party instead of hovering on the edge of killing him, and turned to Alix. 

“How long will this hold him?”

The mechaneer stared at Dekker a moment before shaking himself and turning on the floor, clambering up to look at the screen and judge the power feeds. He shook his head. “Day or so, but that doesn’t solve—”

“Cross,” Dekker growled.

“Shh.” The captain lifted a finger without looking at him. “You tried to kill me five minutes ago—you don’t get a vote.” Then going on to Alix: “Can you work on him like this?”

“No!” Alix said, frustration rising. “Not the level of delicate work that needs done.”

Cross glanced down at the glowering cyborg. “What about his power unit? If you pull that, it forces a shutdown, yes?”

“It’s als-so very pa-ainful,” Dekker muttered.

“You’d rather be dead?” Cross shot back, arching an eyebrow at him.

Dekker brooded (pouted) at the wall, still jerking and hissing in his supercharged bonds. At first contact, the conduits had burned through whatever synthetic skin was left. Now the augs had begun to melt and smoke. And he still simply locked his jaw and twitched.

Alix shook his head, gesturing at the web that spanned the corridor and divided them. “I can’t get to his power unit from here.”

Cross settled to a crouch again, and then to his knees. “Right. Talk me through it.”

“You?” Maddy yelped.

Cross waggled long fingers with a half-grin. “Half as good as any surgeon, darling—swear it.”

"Okay." Alix took a deep breath and a step closer. "Okay. Whatever you do, don’t touch the conduits."

"I’d figured that much out for myself, thank you, Alix."

Dekker studied his captain’s face, eyebrows knit together. “You’ve got to be the most irrational human being I’ve ever met.”

Cross smirked without looking up, his focus on maneuvering around the deathtrap web of cords carrying enough power to kill a man at a single brush. 

"You haven’t spent much time in Venus orbit, have you? I’m delightfully well-adjusted by certain standards."

Dekker glanced around the sleek examination room, clearly either already bored or simply restless in a non-militarized space. Even at this point in his life, free of all but the most basic augments, he'd seen more combat hardware than civilian.

He paced from one corner to another, studying displays for cosmetic augmentations with a squint, glazing over flashy advert vids with disinterest. He was the antsy satellite to the calm center of the room: the girl and her doctor.

Her phalangeal augments had both been removed, the connection points at her wrists covered in the softly glowing apparatus that kept the tissue intact and clean while the doctor adjusted the artificial hands on his sidetable.

Eventually Dekker grew agitated enough to pick up a pen from the doctor’s tray, grin, and toss it at the girl with a mischievous: “Namona—catch!”

The pen bounced off her collarbone, her handless wrists remaining gently in her lap. But she did move to roll her head onto her shoulder and glare at him, lips twitching but remaining flat.

“Hmm,” the doctor intoned in his High Planet accent. “Are you military, young man?”

Namona snorted. “You can tell that by his terrible jokes?”

Dekker’s grin barely reached professional now, and he glanced slyly at the girl on the bench, smothering laughter, but he did stand a little straighter. “Sergeant Ian Dekker, Phoenix Squad, SMTI.”

“Hmm.”

The doctor’s wordless noise reeked of disapproval and something twitched on Dekker’s face. 

“It’s to be expected," the doctor went on. "The training they put you through is meant to desensitize you to common decency. Anything that makes you human.”

Dekker’s relaxed expression went beyond a twitch and into stormy and he took a half step forward.

“Doc, it’s okay,” Namona was quick to jump in. “I don’t—”

The images paused, hovering on the coldly-illuminated screen in the dark lab. Maddy Stirling stared for a moment, fidgeting with her lower lip before reaching out and touching the tracking bar, dragging it backward a few seconds. The figures, displayed from a top corner camera whose recordings she now possessed, jittered and then settled. Another touch and the scene replayed.

“—desensitize you to common decency. Anything that makes you human.”

She paused it this time exactly on the emotional switchover on Dekker's face. Whispers under her breath rose in volume as she zoomed the image so his expression filled the screen.

“Angry. No, upset. At the doctor? The words make him distrust. Distrust the medical professional or distrust his superiors? Does he know? Could he know?”

She rewound again. To the first flinch of something after the doctor’s quiet hum. She followed the way the soldier's facial muscles twisted. It went beyond his features, she noted this time, tightening in his shoulders—slightly less broad without all of the plating and electronics--and winding down to his fingers. But why? Why why why?

“Hey, doc?”

The doctor grunted and waved her hand aimlessly at the voice. “Shh.”

Alix ventured closer instead, watching her replay the scene again. Recognizing the man, he abruptly leaned close over her shoulder. “Shit, is that Dekker? Is this what they brought back from that base?”

“Shhhh.”

“When was this recorded? Holy shit, he looks like another fucking person.”

“Shush! I am studying.”

The boy went quiet until, after three more repeats of those collection of seconds, he finally let out a huff. “Never seen him so pissed. It’s weird. Bet if that was our Dekker, he’d have killed the guy. He really doesn’t like him.”

“Shh—wait. Say that again.”

“It’s weird?”

“No, after that. The end bit.”

“Dekker really doesn’t like that doctor guy.”

“How can you tell?”

Alix only stared at her a moment before shrugging, shifting, glancing away. “I dunno—body language. The guy’s a dick. Normal hints.”

She looked back at the screen, blinking without speaking for a long moment. “I couldn’t see it.”

“Hey…doc…when’s the last time you ate?”

She didn’t respond, not even to glance at him. It was as though he’d ceased to exist. She just kept replaying the clip. Questions hardly registered. Nothing registered. She muttered to herself and watched two minutes of a time long gone, repeated over and over again.

Original purpose in the infirmary forgotten, Alix slipped out his datapad and sat down on one of the gurneys. When she had a lucid moment, he'd ask for access to these mysterious new files she had on Dekker. After all, even if they were hardly the most efficient duo, they were all the guy had now.

Not a hundred meters away in the crew mess, "the guy" in question had accidentally knocked over a glass—thankfully empty—and growled, briefly considering smashing it to slivers. Existential crises did that to a person. So did Venusian whiskey.

"Well, I know for a fact you're still a man." Cross leaned over the table to right Ian's glass and fill it again. "Know how? I can still get you drunk."

"That was one time." Dekker stared at the bluish-black liquid in the glass. He frowned, swayed a little. "...That was three times. And I don't...think intentionally disabling my filtration system counts."

"Shhhhhhh--drink." Cross pushed the glass back toward the cyborg. “If you can still say ‘filtration system’ you’re not there yet.”

“Not where yet?”

Dekker’s scowl vanished into mirth as his own words struck him as silly and he laughed. Laughed. Like this, he was almost human again. Fully and completely. He didn't care about the answer to his question. He closed metallic fingers around the glass with ginger practice and tipped it back against his lips.

Alix sat propped up in his infirmary bunk, atop the covers. He looked strange out of his usual jumpsuit. More boyish. Though that could have also been thanks to the lack of dark smudging and work-mussed hair. The thick mess lay closer to his head, almost fluffy, and someone—possibly the good doctor seated across the room humming a strange tune—had made sure the mechaneer was hospital-clean.

Despite the blue-tinted burn patches still covering his arms and peeking up from the collar of his shirt, he looked well. Back to his old self, even. He even held his perpetual datapad in one hand, frowning terribly at the screen.

“Are you angry at the datapad or at your fingers?”

Ezebel smiled when he looked up, waiting for his eyes to focus out of thoughtful irritation. When he did, his brow didn’t exactly unknot, but a smile quirked his lips.

“Time for my daily shot of optimism already?”

The princess laughed as she moved to her usual spot in the empty seat near his gurney. “I thought I’d come early today.”

Alix grunted. “Good idea. Doc says I’ll be out soon. Later today if I’m good. Tomorrow if I’m not.”

Ezebel tilted her head, shooting him a reproving look. “And are you going to be good?”

He made a swipe on the datapad and exhaled a gruff noise of frustration before lifting his right hand between them. A burn patch still covered his palm, another twining around two of his fingers, binding them together.

“I’d be an angel if this fuckin thing was off. Doc says if I pick at it, I could damage the nerves. I’m of half a mind to test it at this point. Can’t do shit—it’s driving me insane.”

Ezebel leaned over him to see his left hand where it curled around the datapad. It wasn’t much more dexterous, still wrapped in healing bandages. And yet, he was clearly trying to work on something. Brightly-lit schematics covered the datapad’s screen.

“What are you working on?”

Alix scratched at his jaw where a burn patch had been freshly removed. The new skin was slightly paler than the surrounding flesh.

“Ahh, something’s up in the central core. Probably just another glitch in a subroutine.” He glanced, took in her inquisitive expression, and immediately began gesturing with a hand as he explained. “The, er, pathways? That information travels? In a system like this, where I dismantled it and put it all back together, the parts that are out of their usual spot get…dusty. Fuzzy. Gotta keep ‘em clean, and I’ve been out for three days.” Returning his attention to the datapad, he muttered under his breath—“Who knows the state of the engines. I can hear ‘em groaning from here.”

“I’m sure Miss Malikov is doing a fine job.”

Alix grunted.

“Well, we haven’t crashed yet, have we?”

Alix shrugged.

A comfortable pause settled. Ezebel leaned slightly onto the gurney to watch Alix’s usually graceful hands fumble a bit over three dimensional coding. By the fourth error message due to the wrong bit pressed—as far as Ezebel could tell—Alix swore and tossed the datapad down toward his feet. His bandaged hands dug into his hair, returning some of the mad spike to it. When he dropped them back to his lap, palms up, and stared at them, Ezebel ventured to slip her own hand into one of his.

“It won’t be much longer,” she assured, quietly. “You’ll be back to your old self in a matter of hours.”

“Closer I get, the worse I want it,” he muttered, gaze fixed on their joined hands.

Ezebel smiled. “That seems to be the way of most things.”

Another quietness descended. Until the doctor’s humming entered the crescendo of whatever opera she was reenacting in her mind, and her hands flailed above her head, directing an invisible chorus. Alix and Ezebel exchanged glances and muffled snorts.

The princess reached down the bed with her free hand and picked up the datapad, returning it to his lap. “How about you stop worrying about finding glitches and show me something new?”

“Like what?”

His brow came together a little. It could have been grumpiness or maybe suspicion. Ezebel shrugged, waving a hand, the epitome of dismissiveness. “Anything simple.” He shot her a sharp look and she was quick to clarify. “So that I can understand it, Alix, not because of your state.”

He grunted and closed out the complex coding he’d been in, bringing up a clean starting point. When his fingers hesitated above the screen, Ezebel chose her moment to lean in just a few inches.

“How do you 'dust' the system, for instance? I mean, not what you were just doing, of course. But how do you get inside in the first place? How do you find your way and find the problem areas?”

Alix shifted a little, some sort of halfway shrug, but his fingers descended on the datapad. He’d shown her enough things that he’d learned to move slower so she could follow the motions. And he’d gotten quite a bit better at explaining things as well. She was moderately sure he wasn’t even ashamed of his apparently strange names for things.

“Okay, remember the system’s set up like a building, right? There’s stuff in the walls, the floor—different levels and facilities all working together.”

She nodded, expression open and attentive.

“So, if I need to get inside the walls, I gotta create an opening. Can’t just phase through the solid stuff. But I don’t wanna damage anything permanently, so I gotta do it careful.”

“A password.”

He leaned his head back a little, smirking. “You remember?”

“I enjoy learning, Mr. Dyson,” she replied with a smile. “You’re one of the few who actually teaches.”

“Alright.” He turned back to the datapad, but Ezebel watched his face and smiled to see a little proud smirk hinting at the corner of his mouth. “Well, we can skip the intro, then. Yeah, I set up passwords to get through different areas. ‘Cept it’s easier for me to remember code patterns than passwords, so mine are usually—”

He’d started to tap away at one of the “walls” and Ezebel knew just enough to know it wasn’t the navi system. She reached out to touch his wrist, just her fingertips. He paused and glanced over and she smiled, soft and demure and a teensy bit self-deprecating.

“Could…you show me inside the navigation system? It’s the prettiest.”

Alix scoffed a little, but he swiped through the systems until he reached the golden-edged walls of code. “Huh.”

Ezebel glanced from the screen to his face. “What is it?”

“This is…this is where the glitch is. That’s…weird.”

Ezebel swallowed shallowly, but Alix did not turn to look at her. He sounded more curious than suspicious. But after a moment of shifting the wall of code back and forth and testing at it, he glanced over at her with the widest smile he'd worn yet.

“That was a one in ten thousand chance. I swear you’re luckier than the captain.”

Ezebel relaxed into a laugh, glancing down to hide the brunt of it. “Ohh, I very much doubt that.”

“Okay.” Alix was fairly grinning now. “Let’s see if we can do some house-cleaning while I wait for my sentence to be up.”

In which an explanation of the Analeigha's unique escape pods.

“You’ll never guess what I found in the old systems.”

Alix dropped to a seat, disrupting her peace like an explosion in a daisy field. Not that she'd ever seen a daisy field. But she'd heard they were nice and explosions fucked up generally everything.

Indira looked up, conveying with only her eyes how much she didn’t care. Unfortunately the groundie tech seemed immune to it, leaning even closer into her space. Like a gift sent from some higher power, Ian settled to a seat beside her and Alix unconsciously leaned back again.

“What did you find?” the cyborg asked.

Almost seeming to reconsider the whole thing, Alix glanced between the two of them. Reading expectant faces, he slapped his datapad down on the table, clicking and pulling the edges wide to cover the entire available surface. His excitement returned in full force.

“Okay. So, you know the escape pods double as cryo, right?”

Ian nodded. “For long and-or frequent mission jumps, yes.”

“Right. And it helps if your ship gets busted up and you’re gonna be in space awhile. You just jettison, freeze up, and wait to be scooped.”

They simply stared, waiting for some grand revelation now far too long in coming.

Alix grinned and began outlining by touch the systems on the mainframe shown on his datapad. Previously indistinguishable circuit-like lines and boxes took on colorful tints according to the path of his finger.

“Okay, blue’s cryo, right? And this here…in red…is the ejection systems. Nearby but separate. They’re on a flipswitch. Only one can be active at a time. If you activate cryo systems, the escape pod function stops working, relegating control down to individual choice within each pod. Same in the opposite. Don't wanna freeze up when you jettison? Rather set it on a timer? All on personal controls. But this line here…” He traced a new line in green. “—connects them.”

Silence.

“Meaning?” Ian prompted.

“Meaning that the ship’s CO could jettison frozen crew any time he wanted.”

The revelation took a moment to sink in. Alix licked his lips, looking from a stoic face to an even more stoic face. But before Indira or Ian could summon a response, Cross spoke from a few feet away.

“Cut it.”

All three looked over, only Ian not startled by the usually obvious captain’s sudden stealth. Alix glanced around, unsure.

“Uh…what?”

“Cut the function. I don’t want it on my ship.”

“That’ll take forever. This flipswitch override is buried. I mean, there’s thousands of systems and subprocesses built around—”

“I don’t care, Alix!” Cross finally turned his body to face the kid. He’d yet to smile. “I don’t care how long it takes you, I don’t care how deep you have to cut. I want it at the top of your list, I want it out of my ship—do you understand me?”

“Y…Yeah.” The young mechaneer deflated a little, more stunned than anything. “Yeah, I understand. Priority One.”

In which Alix is not built for torture.

For a moment, the world went dark. He hardly even felt the actual punch. Not until he blinked vision back and realized he'd been hit again. 'Don't sass them,' Indira's words came back to him, wavering on the edges of nausea. 'You're not Cross.' 

Breathing hard through a broken mouth, Alix struggled to look up again. When he managed, he was glad for the effort. His gaze barely flickered behind the hulking man above him, but when he focused again, he grinned. Through blood and loose teeth, he clenched his jaw in a deathmask of a smile. Red oozed between white. His laugh was nothing more than a harsh breath, spraying the brute's boots.

"You better've just thought of the funniest goddamn intel you're ever gonna give up, kid." The bruiser's voice was low and amused. His knuckles were red. "Or this is gonna enter a new level of painful."

"You lose, fucker," Alix spat. "Meet Ian."

The sexy soft purr of robotics announced a large hand clamping on the beater's shoulder. A quick whine in the fingers served as prelude to the muffled snappling crack of bones under skin.

The brute dropped to his knees with a horrified scream, struggling to writhe away, twisting to look as Ian continued to close his artificial fist on fragile flesh. Maintaining that grip, he drew his free hand up near his opposite shoulder and brought it across the man's face in a vicious backhand. 

It happened too quickly to see the facial bones turn to powder on contact, the teeth crack, the brain smash into the inside of the skull, the neck snap.

There was just the blow, and then the man: lying twisted on the ground, bleeding from eyes, mouth, and nose.

Alix only fully sagged down then, slipping off his knees and onto his rear with a rattle of his chains and a painful jolt through his body. He coughed to cover a sob. He exhaled, long and low, tremulously. Tears of relief and pain gathered at the corners of his eyes, but refused to fall.

Ian and Cross entered the hall to the cargo bay to find the shore party already waiting near the port airlock. ‘Shore party’ was a little generous. It was just Indira and Alix and Kenzi. Ezebel was nearby, but that was simply because she wanted to see them off.

Indira looked much the same as ever, though she'd donned her gloves with the hook claws on the knuckles and the gun on her back looked almost too heavy for her slight frame to support. Alix had shed his usual jumpsuit in favor of an actual shirt, pants, and jacket. He'd even smudged off some of the worse grease stains.

The captain smiled as he approached, arms spread. “Alix! You decided to join us after all.”

The mechaneer shrugged one shoulder. “Decided the recycled air of a spaceport’s the best I’m probably gonna get for awhile.”

“So it has nothing to do with the fact that we’ve arrived at a leisure house?” 

Alix’s cheeks heated a little, but the look in his eyes spoke only of murder.

Immune to it, Cross glanced back at Ian. "Why don't you stay here, then. I'd prefer someone with tech knowledge keep an eye on things."

"Yes, sir."

Dr. Madeline Stirling was in a terrible rush. Couldn't imagine how she'd forgotten. She hit her shoulder on the boy's as he stormed from the engine room and remembered. Oh, yes. His hands. That was why this wasn't taken care of ages ago. Before he could get another step, she dropped her datapad and snatched his wrists, inspecting for scarring or lingering infection.

"Jesus!" he yelled, yanking them back. Maddy blinked at him. Alix sighed, gentled. "I'm fine, doc. You can stop checking."

"Yes." She glanced away, took a breath and paused.

"You...looking for somebody?"

Almost sheepishly, the doctor looked up at the tall young man. "The...new one?"

Alix snorted, jerking his thumb back in the direction he'd come. "Help yourself. Go nuts, even."

Then he continued on his previous trajectory. The doctor squinted, following his path, guessing where he'd go. Nuts. Cross told her not to. She wasn't sure what it meant. With a shrug, she walked into the room and spotted the young woman.