X and Zero, Sliders Extraordinaire Chapter 1, a mega man fanfic

X and Zero: Sliders Extraordinaire

Prologue

I turned on my creator in disgust. "Flip a coin? You suggest that I, the greatest scientist ever made, turn to random chance to determine his career? You're making me laugh."

The old man stared emotionlessly back at me. He was too weak even to form a decent expression of indignation.

What a disgrace, an injustice that this wrinkled old human had the nerve to build me! And now, of all things, he dared suggest so arbitrary a method for me to choose my path. All the while, his array of support machines thumped and hummed in the background, processing his fluids in a determined effort to spare his life; I wondered if they hadn't turned his brain to mush instead. Pity they couldn't have killed him in the process.

Aurelius Cain sluggishly shrugged his wizened old shoulders. His voice barely managed a whisper; electronic implants helped him here too, in the form of subcutaneous microphones. What a tremendous waste of circuitry.

"You are my last and greatest creation. No matter what you do, you will make me proud." His voice rasped disgustingly from a throat ravaged by disease and covered in whitish scars. Those old hazel eyes fixed unblinkingly on my own. "No matter what, Gate. Whether chance chooses or you do."

I allowed for a dignified, disdainful silence after that statement. With the briefest sneer to show my absolute disgust for his sickly old body, I turned my back on my creator forever. He died a short few years later.

I had made my decision long before then.

Heads, I would go into derived science and make reploids like every half-rate machinist from California to Pakistan. At best, I make reploids as good as Megaman X or Zero, only to have the Maverick Virus swoop in and destroy my best work in a moment.

Tails, I turn to fundamental theories and manipulate the very curvature of the universe. I succeed where Einstein failed—the Grand Unification Theory.

Why flip the coin in the first place? Looking back, the choice is obvious.

Tails.

Chapter One: in which Zero uses excessive force.

"You just had to turn down the peace pipe!"

"I didn't think I'd be declaring war!"

Arrows whizzed over our heads as we ran through the brush. I struggled to pump my wimpy human legs any faster; X had a lead on me and the natives were closing from behind. "This is insane! Why did we come here, anyway?"

"I told you, I don't know! The—gah!" An arrow broke on the back of X's blue plate mail. "Just focus on running!"

I gritted my teeth. Leaves whipped in my face as I ducked under a low-hanging branch. I dropped a hand to my side, where the hilt to my long sword lay against the swordbelt. "We can't keep running forever! They're faster than us!"

As if to prove my point, a couple of bare-chested natives with hand axes popped out of the bushes to my side, swinging for my neck. I batted one aside with a gauntleted hand, and the other skipped off my bright red shoulder armor. X faced similar problems when another fighter in leather leggings dropped out of a tree to spear him in the chest.

"Hyah—uhg!" The muscled brave lost his war-shout and his weapon in an unintelligible grunt as X's fist buried itself in his gut. Next the man's own spear thumped into the back of his neck, a blow scientifically placed to bring him down to the ground without killing him. The Blue Bomber ran on with spear in hand. He was almost side by side with me thanks to the delay.

"If we can survive another hour, then we'll slide out anyway." He broke the spear on a tree as we passed, and the weapon disappeared in a swirl of light. In another second his armor changed color to oak-brown, leather-tan and three shades of leafy green. It was almost good enough to work as camouflage. "I'm sure they won't chase us forever."

"We don't have forever, X. My lungs—" I coughed up phlegm and drew my sword as I ran. Noises from behind told me a couple of braves were gaining fast. "We'll run outta steam!"

He glanced over his shoulder. "Don't hurt anyone, Zero!"

"Not unless they try to hurt me first."

I pivoted around 180° and skidded to a stop with sword drawn out in front of me. Three native warriors closed in at a run, one of them ducking as two stopped to throw tomahawks. I dodged the one and smacked the other from the air with a blow from my sword.

"Come on, give it another try!" I roared my challenge at their brown-skinned faces. Another volley of arrows hit home on my breastplate, but my feet were set and the wooden shafts splintered off me like twigs. If I got unlucky and they hit a weak spot, I was dead, but none of the bowmen were close enough to aim that well yet.

Meanwhile, the braves in front of me looked a little uncertain. The oldest was aged maybe forty years, and the other two twenty or less. One of them glanced over his shoulder to see how fast reinforcements were coming, and I didn't think I'd get a better shot. I charged them with another roar.

My attack didn't make the oldest warrior as much as blink. He brought up his hand axe in a lightning reflex and hurled it for my face. The weapon spun in so fast I nearly missed it.

But I didn't.

My sword caught the axe where handle met head. Instead of just blocking it, my blade sheared its way through the weapon's iron blade. The disembodied handle thunked off my hip while most of the head buried itself in a tree limb to my right. None of this stopped the momentum of my charge, which carried me right into the first human warrior.

He had a spear ready to gore me, and the hard cast of his expression made me think he knew how to use it. Even his elder's lost weapon or the crazy look in my own eyes didn't faze him. The brave stabbed hard at the chain mail joint where my breastplate hung over my codpiece.

He never quite reached it. I threw myself sidelong to him, letting the spearhead skip some black paint off my chain mail as it passed. My following shoulder rush smashed into the warrior's chest and threw him bodily into one of his comrades. I let the remaining brave have a good, hard swing of the sword, which bit into his weird pointy club and slammed it into his head with one clean motion. Dang, but I am good.

The brave staggered and fell with his eyes crossing. With luck, I hadn't given him more than a bad concussion. I freed my blade with a quick stomp on the club.

Those danged bowmen didn't stop, though. More arrows flew in from the forest and smacked into my armor at the legs. Before I could move to protect myself, I felt a jerk against the inside of my thigh, where my plate mail didn't cover me properly. My armor was designed for horseback maneuvers, and it's hard to sit on a horse with metal plating right where your legs rest against the saddle, so I didn't have anything more than leather there. Hot red blood ran down my leg.

X dropped down from the trees some fifty yards ahead of me and thwacked a few bowmen with his new spear. Before the rest knew what had hit them, he was gone into the branches again. That's the Blue Bomber for you. With how fast he adapts, you'd think he's something supernatural.

I grinned. More braves rustled in from the brush on either side and the two fighters in front were slowly getting back up, but X had given me a battle plan. Ignoring the hot, lancing pain from my wounded leg muscles, I stepped forward and hauled the youngest warrior to his feet by grabbing him around the neck.

"Listen up, Red Leaf Warriors!" I bellowed loud enough to startle birds from the trees a hundred yards away. "Before I start fighting!"

The landscape around me fell silent as the braves hesitated. I had them now. Holding their tribesman off to one side, his toes barely brushing the ground, I continued my speech. My voice came out in a vicious growl. "I brought the tent down on your chieftain, but I'll bring down your whole tribe if you keep this up. I control the ghosts in the forest and the birds in the trees!"

A spear shot down from the trees at an angle, slicing through one man's bowstring before planting its foot-long head in the dirt. Another man next to him disappeared into the trees as a camouflaged figure caught him from above. Before all eyes turned away from the scene again, the spear dissolved into a shimmering cloud and vanished away.

"Your kinsmen will die!" I directed my shout at the oldest brave I'd seen. It looked like he had a joint twisted out of place from when I shoulder-rushed his tribesman into him. The hardened old warrior glared at me with hard brown eyes set in a stoic mask. Meanwhile, his younger tribesman scratched feebly at my arm, rasping desperately for air.

I forced my expression to harden further. "Keep coming after us, and we'll bring an army of ghosts and soldiers to your tents. Let us go in peace and your people can live. Or do you want the spirits to avenge us?"

A warrior fell from the trees into the brush. He lay very still when he landed.

"Speak or the spirits will speak again!" I lowered my sword at the elder warrior. The brave I held on my left had nearly passed out from lack of oxygen.

I watched the older man's eyes, waiting for his response. The forest held its breath as the desperation grew behind his wooden features. I felt the pulse weaken in the throat of the man I held, and my heart sank. What had I done?

When X didn't take the peace pipe, the natives around the fire had turned ugly. Their leaders started springing to their feet and I thought for sure they meant to attack. I've lived through attack after Maverick attack by moving fast, grabbing the initiative, and all but jumping the gun to get off the first attack. When the natives jumped to their feet I did too, sword halfway from its sheath before I knew I had drawn it. Just like that, confusion turned into violence. We ran from the tent before the chieftain ordered his braves to skin us alive.

Now I had probably cracked one human's skull and brought another one to the point of passing out. Unless I let him go in another few seconds, he'd suffer permanent damage. We'd gone from trade negotiations to broken bones and homicide in the blink of an eye.

The forty-something native opened his mouth to speak, and my fingers twitched to release his tribesman. He got out four words:

"You have brought dishonor—"

And the universe disappeared from around us.

G0G0G

My instruments returned a few interesting data points from their observation of the moving fabric called space-time. Apparently, sending X and Zero through the wormhole to another universe had created a great deal of flux in the subspace around their anchor point.

Excellent. Maverick Hunter Headquarters' paltry research funds and my years of effort had not gone to waste; all proceeded as planned.

I, the great Dr. Gate, had of course utilized my own person as that interdimensional anchor point. As such, my continued existence in this universe helped to limit theirs in that one, just as a ship cannot wash away while an anchor holds it down. So long as I held the circuits of the Multi-Dimensional Anchor in my body, I functioned as their tether to home, a beacon for their subspace imprints to follow in their journey back. One copy of the circuits resided in my brain while another resided near my power core; even if I lost one, the other still held the power to bring the sliding adventurers back. And, simultaneously, to keep the side effects of their transference centered strictly on my body.

After checking them for consistency, I fed the observed data into a program prepared for the purpose of further analysis. I felt a certain personal stake in the results. Based on what my Grand Unified Theory illuminated for me so far, repeated flux of space-time around my person could possibly weaken the stability of my own subspace imprint and render me a soulless incarnation of the void. Or, possibly, our universe's fabric could weaken around me, rendering me a source for secondary wormhole effects. A gate to subspace, if you will.

Such interesting possibilities. But I had no way of knowing their total veracity just yet. That remained to be calculated—and observed.

A queer popping and a flash of light interrupted my musings. X and Zero, sliders extraordinaire, had returned.

XGXGX

"That was ridiculous."

Zero threw down his MDI and stalked out of the room. His long blond ponytail lashed one way and the other with the rhythm of his stride, nearly catching in the door as it slid shut behind him. I tried to react in time to stop him, but those two seconds of post-slide grogginess held me down too long.

Sliding between dimensions must be close to the strangest thing we've ever done. My thoughts turned back to those people and the expressions on their faces when they first saw us, wandering unafraid through their lands in our shining colored armor. It was weird at first to see that our MDIs had turned our bodies human for that universe, but I wonder if it wasn't even stranger for the people there.

Unbidden, and for what felt like the hundredth time, my last meeting with Dr. Light burst in on my thoughts.

White winter waves whipped around my face as I marched towards the cave entrance. Frost Walrus might have been retired, but his zone remained as inhospitable as ever. The 17th Elites had gone beyond the call of duty to find Dr. Light's capsule in a place like this.

I smiled happily into the freezing air. That was my unit, always doing more than I asked of them.

"Zero seems upset." Dr. Gate leaned back from the control panel with an expression of detached curiosity. "Whatever happened on the other side?"

I shook my head and came out of my reverie. I must have looked a little strange, standing there staring at the door, but the researcher's expression didn't indicate he'd seen anything unusual. A tiny smile curled on his angular face.

"We ran into some trouble. Dr. Gate, weren't we supposed to come down near a metal-rich town somewhere? The people we met seemed more like hunter-gatherers than miners. Also, and not that I'm not grateful, but we came back an hour before schedule."

"Interesting…maybe a scanner malfunction? I really need to work out the bugs on those." Talking mostly to himself, the scientist Reploid maneuvered around a tangled array of wires and computers, making his way for the platform where Zero and I had reappeared. His expression of curiosity turned to frustration as he fought through the chaos.

"I do so hate the condition of this laboratory! It's impossible to make any progress with everything so sloppy. Never mind, very soon we'll make a much better setup and my work can really begin. New trade agreements are only the beginning of what wormhole travel can do for us, you know."

I just sighed. After what happened, what Zero had been through, I didn't have the heart to respond to Gate's enthusiastic predictions; besides which, the time had come to go report to Signas. I picked up Zero's Multi-Dimensional Interface and presented the research reploid with both MDIs.

"I'm sure General Signas will be in touch with you soon. See you, Dr. Gate."

An eager gleam shone from his eyes as he took the devices. They were small and nondescript, almost like little metal breadboxes, but these little metal breadboxes had taken us to another world and back again. Incredible, the advances the scientist had made in so short a time.

Gate didn't seem ignorant of his successes, either. From what I gathered, he had an unfortunate reputation for lording it over the other scientists around him, and didn't show any particular affection for authority figures either. He responded to my statement with a pinched expression. "He will, will he? Hmph."

I smiled back at him before the door closed behind me, but the researcher was already making a path back to his workbench. Maybe the MDIs themselves were small, but the equipment for building and designing them wasn't. The new equipment for calculating wormhole travel had completely taken over Gate's laboratory.

I turned and walked down the wide, curving halls of Maverick Hunter HQ. General Signas' office was on the other side of the base, and he wanted us to report on our second slide as soon as possible, but I had a lot to think about before the debriefing. My armored metal feet moved slowly through the chrome-lined halls.

Dr. Light had chosen an odd location, underground in this inhospitable place. I don't know how he moves his capsules around or powers them, but this one he'd dropped in a surprisingly warm location for the surrounding terrain. As I slid down the first part of the tunnel, then climbed up the second, my instruments read the temperature rise from below 0 to almost fifteen Centigrade. Inside the final chamber, it felt like fully twenty.

Zero hadn't really recovered from the fight on the Final Weapon yet. In public he refused food, broke furniture and made snide remarks at anyone who crossed his path; in private he sat hunched over, staring at the wall, brooding over what had happened. He barely trained anymore and he'd left his unit in the hands of his new second, Chrome Tiger.

Those last two behaviors worried me the most. Maybe normal people take time to recover after a major fight, but in the first war Zero had survived power core detonation only to run back to the front lines the minute we rebuilt him. I've personally seen him go down fighting, have a near-death experience, and then wake up to tear someone's legs off for "looking at me funny."

He was right to do so, it turned out. The reploid mechanic had been a Maverick responsible for building critical faults into the Ride Armors we used in heavy fighting. Zero had an uncanny knack for spotting people infected with the Maverick Virus.

At that point I my communicator buzzed with a text message from one of the office secretaries. My waffle maker had arrived. That made me smile. Not to be distracted, though, I got back to worrying about Zero.

In summary, I knew better than to think the last battle with Sigma left the fighting robot with some kind of crippling physical injury. No, Zero wasn't hurting because he'd fought the boss of all Mavericks. He was hurting because he'd fought his own spotter, Iris.

I turned a corner, leaving the Research and Development wing and heading for the officers' quarters. Most high-ranking Hunters, myself and Zero included, slept in rooms joined to our separate offices. It was easier that way, and the kind of reploids who made it to officer status tended not to care much about the frills in life. I'm one of only two of us who owns a house outside the base.

A couple of reploids I knew ran into me on my way through HQ. I gave them cheerful smiles and whatever greetings came to mind, but most of my processing power dwelt on the problem of Zero and on Gate's new wormhole devices.

At first it seemed like a great idea: the power to cross subspace to other universes, trade technology for valuable resources, and maybe even find uninhabited worlds for humans and reploids to settle. Unfortunately, our first slide had ended in failure and our second in disaster. None of this had improved Zero's state of mind or my outlook on sliding.

I was just wondering how to break all this to Signas when a worried soprano voice interrupted my thoughts. A shiver travelled up my spine.

The chamber itself wasn't much to speak of. Hardened river clay with old sedimentary layers underneath made up the earthen walls. The sedimentary deposits had little sea creatures stuck in them from thousands or tens of thousands of years ago, their calcified remains reminding me of a time before robots, reploids, or even humans. Other than that, it was simply a dark, warm, slightly damp chamber with a huge cylindrical machine that held the brilliant mind of my incredible creator, Dr. Thomas Light.

My movements slowed as I approached the capsule. Here he was again, as so many times before, hidden from the sight of anyone but his last creation. And as I thought those words his hologram flared into life, bright as a halogen lamp in the dark room. The old man looked down at me and laughed his jolly old man laughter.

"X, it's been so long! What, a month now? How's the Fourth armor treating you?"

His voice bore tiny distortions from imperfections in the audio systems, but it was him. I smiled. "I'm doing very well, Father, and the armor's doing great too. The multi-shot option works out well for the most part. I think the Nova Strike is the best, though. Where do you get the ideas for all these parts?"

"Now, now, if I told you that you'd be able to make your own armors, X. I can't have you doing that—when do I ever get to see you besides when you come to me for upgrades?"

He laughed, but I frowned, scrunching up my forehead in disapproval. "That's not the only reason. I'd come to talk to you whether you had weapons and armor for me or not."

"X, there you are!" The speaker's footfalls slowed from a run to a walk. "What happened just now? Zero ripped off the front door on his way off the base. Even for him, that's pushing it."

My facial features carefully reassembled themselves into a guarded expression of concern, and I turned around to face her. Alia stopped a couple of feet away and gave me a worried look. I forced myself to ignore her…design and bring Zero's problems back to mind. Unfortunately, we weren't alone in the hallway, and everything I wanted to say was more or less confidential. "We had some trouble."

Something in my tone tipped her off. The blue-eyed reploid nodded and pulled me along to walk with her. Her voice came in a low, forcibly relaxed tone that belied the message in her words. "What kind of trouble? I'll understand if you can't tell me everything here."

My whole body tingled at the touch of her fingers, while a sudden spike in fusion core temperature sent a rush of heat to my head. A wave of dizziness washed over my senses. Even now, four weeks after the upgrade, I still had trouble keeping my body's reactions under control around her.

"I know, I know." He waved his hands in emphasis, to placate me. "I'm sure you'd come to see me regardless, but you're too easy to tease, X. Doesn't your friend Zero have as much fun teasing you as I do?"

"Hmph. My father is so cruel, he wants all my friends to laugh at me like he does." I pouted. "There's no hope for me. I'll be a laughingstock until I rust away into pieces."

Dr. Light chuckled and wagged his finger at me. "Not for another eight hundred years, X. You have a lot of life left to live, and I mean to see that you enjoy it. That's why I came here in this capsule today, in fact."

I nodded. Here it came. "You have another armor part for me?"

"Oh no, I'm sure what you have will be more than enough." He coughed. "No, what I have for you today is not so much for your quantity of life, X, as it is for your quality of life."

The reploid felt my body sway as I walked, and tightened her grip. My coolant pump worked like mad to compensate for the excess heat and keep it away from my brain. "Wait, X, are you all right? Your cheeks are turning red."

I felt like a kid on Christmas morning. "What is it? A new karaoke system? Better looks? Zero's always making fun of me for looking like a teenager. I'll still be recognizable to my team, though, won't I? I'd hate for them to not know who I was." My mechanical fingers twiddled with excitement. "What is it, Dr. Light?"

"You'll see soon enough. It's going to revolutionize the way androids look at their lives, and you'll be the first to pioneer the new system. For that reason, and for many others, this may be a hard change for you." My father's eyes took on a certain softness, though the hologram's sketchy imaging made it difficult to tell. "Next time you find one of my capsules, I want you to bring a special friend along for me to work on. Your new upgrade isn't really complete until you can share it with someone else."

This last part mystified me. I'm sure it showed on my face, because Dr. Light laughed again. "Don't be afraid, X. This is for your own good and everyone else's, too. Step into the capsule and you'll understand very soon."

I hesitated, knowing that once I entered the device I'd lose contact with my creator until I found another capsule. He encouraged me with a fatherly smile. "Come now, don't worry. I'll see you again soon, son."

I thanked him and he disappeared with a wave good-bye. Having to say farewell damped my enthusiasm for the new upgrade, but not enough to keep me from stepping up onto the brightly colored metal platform. Glass panels sprouted up to insulate me from the outside world, and colorless gaseous argon flooded the container, forcing out gasses like oxygen that would react undesirably to the capsule's method of upgrading my systems. Next, energetic packets of particles started to shoot through the air around me, cascading from the top of the capsule to the bottom and back again. They shot faster and faster through the air until the argon was no more than a low-power plasma. My body started to burn from the inside out, worse than with any other upgrade.

What was happening to me?

I shook my head as if to clear it. "Don't worry, it's nothing. Zero's angry about our last mission. It wasn't very successful."

Out of the corner of my eye I saw her frown deepen at the way I changed the subject. She paused before asking her next question, as if struggling to resist probing me further about my own apparent problems. Alia's not the type to let a mystery stay mysterious. Even more importantly, she considers it her personal responsibility to make sure Zero and I don't work ourselves to death. Literally.

For the moment, concern for Zero won out. He had, after all, ripped a door off its hinges and stormed out of the base for no apparent reason. She continued in a low but casual tone to keep from drawing attention. "Do you mean the Final Weapon?"

"Yes, and a few small jobs here on base."

Her clear blue eyes peered over into my green ones, and I saw her expression change as she decoded what I meant. "You didn't find what General Signas sent you to look for."

Ah, so she understood. "No, and we accidentally tipped over a cabinet. No one was permanently damaged, though."

I thought I'd crafted this last piece of code fairly well, but Alia crinkled her nose up at me. "A cabinet? That's all?"

"There were humans on site." Recognition dawned in the reploid's eyes, and a little fear. I shook my head and continued. "Like I mentioned, I don't think the injuries are past fixing, but Zero blames himself and I'm wondering if trying to fetch that item was worth the mess."

Alia opened her mouth, shut it, and shook her head. Her short blond locks bounced around her face in a way that made me bite my lip. "We'll talk more later. In your office, around 1900 hours?"

Lightning surged down through the argon plasma. And if it wasn't lightning, it looked and sounded like nothing else. The energy sizzled down into my helmet, coursed through my titanium alloy bones, and coruscated out through my feet into the other end of the capsule. On its way it buzzed through my systems and altered my functioning forever.

I shivered. Goosebumps, that's tingly.

When the argon finally resettled and the capsule walls came down, I felt no different than before. The crawly sensation on my skin gently faded with the rush of normal air over my armor. I didn't know it yet, but I was a whole new android.

This evening? Alone, with her? No!

I hesitated, wondering if she heard how hard my coolant pump was beating. Meeting together had been common in the old days, before my upgrade. The upgrade I hadn't told her about, the one I'd never seen coming…since that day, I'd been careful not to leave myself alone with her.

I was about to make some excuse, put Alia off, when a surge of guilt blocked my throat. With Zero in his condition, was I really going to deny the one other person best capable of helping him? What kind of friend did that make me?

My face caught on fire as I replied. "Yes, of course. Thanks for taking the time, Alia."

Her smile triggered a rush of gratification that made it hard to look away. "Anything for a friend, right? Which reminds me…"

Alia reached up and brushed her fingertips against my throat, and I practically had a seizure. When I did that the reploid frowned and pinned me to the wall, feeling around for the line that fed power and coolant into my electronic brain. She found it in short order, and I froze at her touch on my pulse.

She shook her head at me, still frowning. "Like I thought, you're burning up. X, you're going to go see Lifesaver after this meeting with Signas, or you'll answer to me later tonight."

Her tone brooked no disagreement. I resisted for a moment longer, feeling trapped in more ways than one. "No, Alia, it's really nothing, I promise youaaargh—unh."

My neck hurt briefly where she'd pinched it. The blond's expression had turned fierce; she looked like a pink-armored she-wolf with misbehaving cubs. "Forget it! You've been acting weird for weeks, X, and now I have proof that you're malfunctioning. I won't let you put yourself at risk for no reason like this. I—I just won't."

I gaped at her in surprise, recognizing the sparkle of tears in her eyes. The reploid's gaze fell to the floor and her arms dropped to her sides. She took a step back and crossed them over her chest. "Besides, going out into the field with an injury is against regulations if there's a way to get treatment first. You know that."

Of course I knew that regulation. I wrote it. But Alia had no idea what was really wrong with me.

Silence reigned for a long moment while I gazed into her beautiful pale face. Even without the capacity for romantic attachment, she felt for me this strongly?

I understood the fear of losing me. Zero avoided close friendships for that reason; other than me, to a lesser extent Alia, and until recently Iris, he looked at everyone around him as potential casualties in the next serious conflict. According to him, I'm too tough and too smart to die before he can get to me; again according to him, Alia's probably hiding a backup model of herself somewhere; and Iris—he thought she was too small and helpless for Sigma to bother with infecting. No one, least of all Zero, expected her to go rogue on her own. The little reploid proved us wrong.

Alia apparently didn't intend to make the same mistake of negligence with me and my health. I felt a lash of guilt at the realization that my behavior, my keeping secrets, had brought her to the point of tears.

Without thinking, I stepped in towards her and half-lifted my arms around the reploid's body. Maybe a month ago that would've been fine, but here and now—I jerked away from her before my traitorous arms could close the embrace.

"I'm sorry, I have to go!" I turned and raced down the hall.

"Nineteen hundred hours, Commander!" she shot at my back as I departed. "You'd better have seen Lifesaver by then!"

I didn't respond. Reaching Signas' door, I turned the handle and threw myself inside, finally safe from my libidinous urges.

"That was way too close." Eyes squeezed shut with relief, I let out a breath and leaned against the door. Alia no doubt wondered what my sudden departure meant, but she was back in the hallway and I was home free. Great Light, but that had been too clo—

"Commander X?" Signas' voice roused me from my reverie. My eyes snapped open to see him sitting at his desk with pen in hand, settled uneasily on a stack of papers. "Your face is red as a beet. Are you feeling all right?"

I blinked at him for a second. Equipped with that severe military desk, the high-backed red leather swivel chair, and the Maverick Hunter insignia on every piece of furniture, the General's office dwarfed most reploids with both its size and its sheer officialdom. The reploid in front of me dominated it easily. Signas' size, black armor and severe military hat were designed for intimidation, as far as I can suppose, although I'd known him too long for that to work very well. Besides, he wasn't wearing the hat today for some reason. "General Signas, good to see you. Did you want a report on the second wormhole mission?"

He cocked a thick, black eyebrow at me, his mouth set in a wary line. "You barged in here without knocking for that?"

"No sir, not at all. I'm sorry, I had to get away from Alia. Never mind." I forced my thoughts away from her before I got lost again. Later, I told myself. "I have a feeling Zero won't be coming back for a while, but when he does he can give you his report too."

"Hmm." Signas fixed me with a long, calculating stare. "You know, if you have a problem with her, we can move Alia back to Research and Developm—"

"No! I mean, no sir. She's not a problem. Our second slide with Gate's equipment didn't turn out so well, though. In fact, I'm having doubts about the whole process right now." My eyes strayed downwards as I changed the subject. Wait, what was that under the end table? "The MDIs are still glitchy, and I'm worried about whether we can—I'm sorry, but is that your hat down there?"

Signas cleared his throat and tapped his fingers on his desk. "You were saying, about the MDIs? What kind of problems are we talking about here?"

"It is your hat. And there are playing cards lying around it…" I crouched down on the floor to get a better angle.

When I glanced back up at him, the general was scowling at me. "That's not important now. X, we can't allow ourselves to be distracted with an entire Maverick-fighting organization to run."

"It doesn't take that much work to run in peacetime. We mostly hire secretaries for that. General Signas, were you tossing cards into your hat to kill time?"

"No, not at all. Of course not."

"It's all right. I understand. I mean, if it weren't for karaoke and hunting out Dr. Light's capsules, I don't know how I'd spend all my spare time between wars. After Dr. Cain passed away I nearly died of boredom trying to take his place here."

"I was merely training my hand-eye coordination. There's nothing wrong with a reploid practicing his combat skills to take a break."

I nodded. "Of course not. And if that means playing a few hours of Xbox when nobody's watching, who's to say there's no training value in a good FPS? We should game together sometime. I'll make waffles."

He gave me an unfriendly look. "I do not play Xbox."

I nodded again. Here we had been working together for almost a year now, since before the fourth war, and I was just getting to know my commanding officer. "No, it's the Wii for you, isn't it? I guess that works, if you can deal with the limited selection. The only WiiSport I ever liked was frisbee." I mimed flicking a game disk with my hand.

Signas sat back in his chair, his face unreadable. I sighed. "Now, about the wormhole project…"

"What, starting without me?"

I turned around to see Zero standing in the entryway. That android is incredibly quiet when he wants to be, which is almost never, making him all the more unexpected on the rare occasion.

Pardon me for taking a tangent, but you'll notice I say "android," not "reploid." Zero and I are the original androids. All other sentient robots are based on our design; replicated androids, or reploids, for short. Most people don't think about that distinction much, and I'm happy that they don't, but there's no way for me to forget that Zero and I are two of a kind. Even if we probably don't share a creator, I think of us as brothers, and brothers look out for each other.

0X0X0

X got out of his chair and hugged me.

Do you know how hard it is to stay mad when that dumb blue robot is hanging on around your chest? I can never tell when he's about to pull that trick, either. It's like there's a switch in his head that randomly goes "plonk," and next thing I know he's all over me. At least if we were human I could call him a gaytard and shove him off, but everyone knows reploids don't have genitals. There's no chance of him being gay even if he wanted to be.

I settled for patting him awkwardly on the head. "There there, baby X. You're going to be all right. Daddy's home now."

He released me and wordlessly pulled out a chair, green eyes smiling. That's another thing. I can't get under the guy's skin without three days and a surgical tool. What is it about X that makes him immune to teasing? Is it that I haven't found the right method, or does he have some kind of censor that blocks out negative thoughts?

Either way, he drove me nuts. Time for business.

"All right then, sunny smiles everyone. We've been to two universes and had a grand total of no successes at all." I folded my arms and stalked all the way into the room to stand in front of Signas' desk. "Gate's new trick isn't doing anyone any good. I say we send rookies through it for training and stop trying to turn ourselves into intergalactic door-to-door salesmen."

Signas frowned. "Please, take a seat, Commander Zero."

After a split second pause, I let myself slide into one of the chairs by X. He patted me on the shoulder and started the discussion of the mission.

"Gate finished his latest version of the MDIs about…" the Blue Bomber glanced up at the ornate steel clock on Signas' wall. "Half an hour ago, and we left on our second interdimensional slide immediately afterwards."

"Wait. Half an hour?" My eyes went to the clock to check, and darn it if X wasn't right. "That clock must be wrong. We were there for at least an hour before things went screwy, and Gate warped us back a couple of minutes afterwards. Half an hour is too short."

X nodded. "I don't think we noticed it last time, but there's no guarantee of time passing the same here as in any given world we visit. We're talking about different universes with different sets of parameters for the string harmonics, and there are about ten to the five-hundred and twelfth different possible combin—"

"Right, right, remind me to never let you spend any more time with Gate." I cut the Blue Bomber off with a short chop of my hand. "Weird time lapses aside, I think there's a problem with that reploid's MDI programming. The first time he dropped us in a universe ten years too late, and the second time he put us on the wrong side of the continent. Then, instead of running around saving people from meteors like the first time, we ended up getting attacked and had to fight other humans to protect ourselves. It was ridiculous! If Gate hadn't pulled us out early we'd either be dead or murderers by now!"

I didn't realize it until the end, but my voice had gotten louder with each sentence. I had nearly stood up out of my seat again. Crossing my arms, I leaned back in the chair and scowled at nothing. After a second of silence, Signas probed me further with a question.

"'Other' humans?"

"Yessir, the MDIs rendered us in human bodies in that universe." X answered his question in a low tone. "We were vulnerable, even though we had armor and weapons, and it affected our personalities a little bit. Gate didn't warn us that might happen. I don't think he knows it can. I don't think he pulled us out early, either; the MDIs did that on their own, and we don't know why at this point."

Signas shook his head. Wait, where was his military cap? I wasn't used to seeing that reploid's black-haired head all bare like that.

"I don't understand this wormhole science Gate is doing. It's impossible for anyone but him to analyze, apparently, and the rest of our R&D department is getting a little jealous. But that's a matter for another day." The former private investigator gave me the evil eye. "I expect a complete written report from each of you by tomorrow at 900 hours. That means both of you, Commander Zero."

What, doesn't he like the reports I hand in? Or has he figured out that I make the secretaries do them?

Darn.

Either way, Signas had more or less dismissed us, and we stood to leave. Before he turned to go, X raised a questioning finger, a look of worry on his face.

"What about Gate? Will he get a copy of the reports?"

"Once I've had a look at them." Signas nodded. "Any important technical information will get to him afterwards."

The Blue Bomber's look of worry intensified, but he remained silent. I stepped in and put a hand on his shoulder to stop his usual passive-aggressive antics.

"Signas, general, you know how X doesn't always say everything he's thinking? This is one of those times. Why don't you ask the guy what's got him so worried."

It wasn't really a question, and I gave the general a look that told him not to disagree. Call me an insubordinate, arrogant son-of-a-gun, but last time I saw that expression on X like that I lost—never mind what I lost. It's not important now.

Signas returned my commanding glare for a full two seconds before looking down. He turned his glance to X and nodded. "Please."

The Blue Bomber sighed. "I don't think Gate operates well with that kind of top-down information sharing. I think it offends him when the data for his experiments has to come through another source, especially when he knows us personally."

Hey, speak for yourself, I thought. Maybe X decided to make him his buddy, but I don't see one good reason to trust a brainiac that even other scientists don't like. Gate gave me the creeps. I had to bite my tongue to keep from interrupting.

"May I share my report and Zero's with him directly?" X finished his thought with a determined stare in Signas' direction. Phew, I was off the hook. No interviews from creepy scientist reploids for me.

The general considered X's statements with a finger on his lips. His eyes shifted to me. "I consider your mission information strictly need-to-know, Commanders. But if Dr. Gate needs to know that badly, I suppose I'll allow it."

X nodded with an expression of relief, gave his thanks like Signas had done him a personal favor, and turned to leave. I was about to follow him when the general gave me one last comment to think about.

"Of course, I can't have only X give Gate his report. Zero, make sure you spend at least an hour going over what happened for him. It's for science."

I turned and gave the dark-armored reploid a dirty look. His expression was deadpan with the tiniest glitter in one eye.

Dirty son-of-a-gun knows how to get revenge after all.

X0X0X

Zero stormed out of the office in a huff. I wondered why he didn't like Gate. Other than the obvious reasons, anyway.

Regardless, life rolled on. I had enough Commanding to do that my afternoon happily disappeared into a series of training meetings, inspections, and other fun peacetime work. These boring days between wars are the best—no one dies, no one gets hurt, and no one has to say goodbye to an old friend thanks to the Maverick virus. We had almost fifteen years of peacetime after the first war, before Sigma came back to life and started twisting normal reploids into monsters again.

Before I knew it the sun had gone down outside the complex, leaving nothing but white artificial lighting down the chrome-coated hallways. Most of the humans leave to stay with their families at night, and the reploids have their own places to go in the evening.

1900 hours approached as inexorably as the dawn. I looked forward to it with a swirl of conflicting emotions: hope that we'd find a way to help Zero, anxiety about talking to Alia in private, tingling pleasure at the same idea, fear that she'd try to involve Lifesaver directly, and finally, guilt.

Guilt. I didn't have to wonder why Dr. Light gave me this latest upgrade. I knew well enough. And still, with all my knowledge and all my trust in him, I let fear hold me back from doing what he wanted me to do.

I signed off on a couple more papers and returned two or three more salutes before HQ's operations closed down for the day. Consulting my internal clock, I read the time at 1840 hours, just enough time to go back and change out of my armor before Alia arrived.

Dressed in a new pair of blue jeans and my favorite white t-shirt with a yellow duck on it, I sat down at my desk and fiddled with the mission report I'd written earlier. I had trouble focusing on the words. My mind spawned visions of Alia laughing at me or turning from me in disgust, and to my shame, I even had trouble thinking of Zero's problems for a minute.

Alia's gentle triple tap on the door roused me from my daydreams. Knots twisting in my stomach, I rose from my desk and called her in.