Author's note: Thanks to my wife for her help as a constant source of inspiration, and thanks again to MungoJerry for her tireless beta reading in the face of schoolwork. I also appreciate those who have taken a few minutes to give thoughtful reviews of the story so far. Your comments factor heavily in the continually woven fabric of Mega Man X and Zero's adventures.

Enjoy!

Chapter five: In which the chess game begins.

A little while earlier…

0

Fill—stomach—now.

My eyes cracked open with this single, solitary thought in mind. Fluids—solids—anything to put in my belly.

Apparently, running across endless steppes and mountains, fighting off X's kidnapping attempts, and hiding on seafloors all after refusing food and drink for a week has actual side effects. Who knew? Point being, I needed rations like Sigma needed a new wig.

Stumbling from the sleep capsule, I ran a self-analysis for nutritional needs but gave up at about the 97th item. If someone asked me how I felt, I'd punch him and say:

"Urrrghckl—"

Strangled coughing choked off my attempt at speech. Camels had started to wander across the back of my throat. Dunes blocked my air passage. Extended metaphors heartlessly maimed the remainders of my good humor.

Suddenly, my eyes spotted paradise. The heavens had opened! Food showered down like a glorious raining waterfall of goodness!

I actually saw the remains of the weird human meal that Iris had left for me that one time. She really had been a few relays short of a neural network. But never mind that; I had found food!

…no. No, actually I had found a bunch of crumbs and scraps. (Yeah, I had already eaten it. Being with Iris made me do a lot of weird things.) Delirious with hunger, I dove for the only remaining source of sustenance: a carton of milk, completely untouched. It hadn't even been opened!

I tore open the top of the carton and instantly regretted it. Chunky liquid oozed from the ragged edge of the tear like pus from a sore.

I hurled the decomposing dairy at the wall and gritted my teeth with fury. Somewhere, someone had better be having a worse day than me.

L0L0L

Ionized argon swum around the reploid's body as matter streamed into her. She had started off standing, but by this point—I monitored her carefully as the updates installed.

Widening the hips didn't take long, but adding the extra equipment inside had proven trickier than I liked. I needed Alia conscious and aware for this first part so I could use the internal feedback as added guidance; unfortunately, her pain responses rendered any internal work extremely difficult. I needed to finish installing the new nerve centers before I fried the old ones with stimulation overload.

The time passed intolerably slowly. Putting in the last set of physical updates burned the surrounding tissue into a barely solid mass of alloys. Hopefully she'd make a full recovery on her own; to that purpose, I had already infected her nanobot repair network with a retrovirus that replaced her old blueprints with a copy of the new. I finished up the last piece of work in the torso and moved on to the brain.

Here the work became much more difficult. As gently as possible, I sent the young reploid into a coma and extracted her consciousness into a separate neural drive inside the capsule. With that done, I conducted a tiny amount of new matter through her skull and painstakingly reorganized the existing hardware into a radical new set of patterns. Most I took from X's original blueprints. Some of them I had made especially for Alia in the intervening years.

Believe me, I didn't want to do it like this. I wanted to wait longer, test the updates more thoroughly, and figure out a scheme to install them in stages. I wanted to make it a happy adventure for them. I never wanted Alia to suffer this way, and certainly not risk her life, merely to provide my son with an Eve to his Adam. That could have waited.

Unfortunately, and despite my best efforts, events had begun to spin out of control. The threat of Evil Energy that Rockman and Duo faced in their time had returned, and this time, even my detection systems couldn't pinpoint the source. I only knew that more and more traces of the energy surrounded Maverick Hunters Headquarters, and that when Rockman faced this threat years ago, it compromised his then state-of-the-art security systems before Duo intervened. If Megaman X became infected with Evil Energy without a system in place for finding out and curing him, then my son could become the single greatest threat to humanity ever created. I refused to let that happen.

Backhacking from Alia's systems tore at my senses like a primal scream, jarring me painfully from my work. My qubit computerized consciousness responded automatically with a series of firewalls that allowed me time to think. I needed it; at this stage Alia's brain shouldn't have had the integrity to count past two, let alone launch a counterattack against me. Moments later, with a strategy prepared, I let down the firewalls and went on the attack.

The last robot apocalypse had taken my lab, my children, and in the end, my chance to die as a normal human. If my creation became the second apocalypse, I would have no choice but to intervene and use my knowledge to help them destroy him. Then I would have to watch another of my children die.

So, desperately, I worked to finish the upgrade.

XLXLX

Alia's screams greeted me painfully on my return to consciousness. Distantly, as my memories of the situation fully caught up with me, I realized those screams meant she still lived. Then I heard the noises of my faithful squad firing on the capsule.

"Rumble Rhino, can't you get up here any faster?" Sprint Eagle's voice crackled through on the comlink. An all-but-unintelligible grind of a voice came through in response.

I lifted my head to see no less than three squad members firing on the sealed upgrade capsule. Dents and pockmarks covered its metal plated surface; every few seconds its protective forcefield flared up again, only to dissolve under a barrage from Cataract's long-range energy weapons. In the intervals created by her shots, Sprint Eagle and Rockstar laid down a barrage of short-range brute force attacks in an effort to crack open the capsule's armor.

I struggled slowly to my feet as my limbs spasmed with random twitches. Alia's cries from inside, twisted and distorted from the capsule's strange geometry, grew weaker and weaker. Humming and sizzling from inside the machine drowned out what remained. How could my father do such a thing?

My weapons charged with an ascending whine. Rockstar looked over his shoulder with a flick of his greasy black hair and saw me on my feet. "Commander! Alia's trapped in this capsule and we're trying to get her out. What can we do?"

I stood. My eyes scanned the capsule for weak points, but a thought came to me and I shook my head. "Stand down, Hunters! We're sitting this one out."

Rockstar and Sprint Eagle stopped and stared. Cataract, set up on a ridge on a nearby peak, spoke to us over the comlink as soon as the shock had worn off. Her voice was as bland and monotone as ever. "Commander, please explain."

I powered down my buster. "I know what you're thinking, but that's one of Dr. Light's capsules, not a trap or a fake; it's still busy operating on her. We can't save her now if she's going to die. Stopping the transformation midway would probably only make things worse, which is assuming we can pierce the armor without breaking the inside and killing her directly."

As if on cue, the capsule's protective force field blazed back into life. Alia's weakening whimpers made my heart tremble, but I stood strong for the sake of my troops. We felt the rocks shudder ever so slightly as Rumble Rhino's heavy hoofsteps carried him up the final leg of the trail. Listening to him, my mind latched hold on what we could do. I took a deep breath and spoke aloud as well as over the comm.

"Sprint Eagle, when that capsule opens you'll grab Alia and rush her down to the teleport point for medical evac. Cataract, contact HQ and set up that teleport immediately. Rockstar, you and I will follow Eagle down and cover him in case enemies show up. Rumble Rhino will cover us from here on the peak until HQ has beamed myself and Alia in, then you'll all cover him until he reaches the teleport point himself. Rumble, don't you dare take the fast way down again. We do not need another rockslide on our hands."

I looked back to the capsule, where my wife's whimpering had abruptly ceased. My forceful orders did little to hide my helplessness in the face of her suffering. With no other recourse, I prayed she had the strength to hold on.

0X0X0

Slowly, the other fighter's hands lost the strength to hold on. Curl Foxstar snarled and bared her vicious fangs at me; I took this as a request to twist her grip harder. The fox reploid's superheated claws slipped nerveless off my arm.

Unfortunately, I didn't have the time to tango with the little fire-user all day. Resonance and Cull Fang had already recovered and armed their weapons, which meant I had all of two seconds to move or get my overheated armor shattered and my poor metalloid flesh cut to ribbons. I pulled Curl into an improvised headlock and broke her neck with a sudden twist of my arms. For my next trick, I spun her away one-handed between me and Res, then knocked away Cull's aerial spinscythe with a beam saber quick draw.

"Hey! You said you wouldn't use the beam saber!" Resonance fired at me again as Curl collapsed. I dodged and countered with a charged shot from my Z-buster.

"I said I wouldn't cut anyone with it. But I will shoot you to death." I knocked down a cunning return strike from the spinscythe and grabbed onto the chain that Cull Fang used to swing them around. "Or hey, can I use these?"

"N-No! Get lost!" The jackal reploid tried to yank the weapon out of my grasp. Weak! I neatly sidestepped another shot from Resonance—seriously, was he even trying?—and heaved on the chain.

"Gotta put your back into it!" The weapon's handle jerked out of Cull's hands and snapped across the arena towards Resonance, who flinched as it came within feet of his face.

Cull darted towards me and drew his sidearm. "****, I'll get you Red Demon!"

"Good use of invective!" I shouted and flicked the head of the spinscythe around me. The danged thing nicked me on its way past and flew wild, too far from Resonance to scare him again, but fortunately I didn't have the same problem with the weapon's other end. As a sonic blast cracked my torso armor, I flicked the chain out and smacked Cull Fang right in the kisser. His head snapped back with a gratifying crunch. "But you could use more practice."

To my immense satisfaction, Cull refused to drop from the strike, but veered sideways and fired wild at me while his sight cleared up again. The attacks put pressure on me to keep dodging or blocking while Resonance lined up a kill shot. "Nice teamwork."

What can I say? Some days, I'm just proud to be a commander. I'd really have to work to stay alive this time.

Dropping the spinscythe gave my buster a clear view of Resonance. We fired at the same time, which meant his sonic attack met my plasma in mid-air and burst it in a fantastic explosion. The sheer intensity of the light blinded him while I looked away.

Almost at the same moment, my Z-Saber flicked out and deflected one of Cull Fang's wild shots right back at him. The clever reploid flung an arm out to absorb the hit but failed to anticipate my immediate follow-up move: a full-power body check.

I don't normally do the body slam thing. A lot of combat reploids are designed like wrecking balls to begin with; worse, some Mavericks have a funny way of decorating themselves with spikes and crap. Resonance himself had a built-in skin defense that delivered a nasty shock to anyone who tried grabbing him.

Cull Jackal didn't, though. I lit up my dash jets and came down on the man like a ton of bricks. My heavily armored frame slammed the smaller fighter to the ground and bounced his head off the reinforced concrete floor. Again, showing incredible fortitude, Cull shook off the hit and went for my throat with his mouthful of sparkly glassteel dentures. Those edges didn't feel too friendly on the skin, let me tell you. Before he clamped down for a death grip I head-bashed the Hunter in the forehead and rolled us over to make him take the next shot from Resonance.

Except he wasn't there. I shifted Cull off of me and jumped to my feet, glancing around, but the sonic reploid had disappeared. Nothing but scorched walls and floors surrounded me in all directions. Suddenly, he materialized a few feet in front of me with an apologetic frown.

"Sorry, Commander, I had somebody signal me in the capsule. Hey, you killed him already!"

"Yeah." I glanced back at Jackal. Funny enough, I had crushed in the front part of his skull with that head-butt. "You wanna die?"

He shivered. "No. I'll surrender."

I shook my head and blew his brains out. Geez, noobs.

The sound of his collapsing body faded out before I finished sighing. I found myself lying on my back in my rec pod, with Cull Jackal, Curl Foxstar, and Resonance all in various stages of getting out of theirs. "Cull, Curl, get out of here. Resonance, ATTEN-SHUN!"

I shouted it like a proper drill sergeant. My animal-type subordinates threw the door closed behind them, while Resonance hopped from his rec pod and snapped to attention. His armor's violent yellow-blue color scheme suddenly struck me as an incredibly offensive design.

"Corporal Resonance, you make me sick. Why did you even get assigned to this unit in the first place?"

His eyes stared straight forward and he spoke with the stiffest tone possible. "Lt. Major Spotlight felt my combat abilities were wasted as an operator, sir."

"You didn't answer the question, corporal. Try again. Why are you in my unit?"

He swallowed. "My old commander thought you'd be the best one to break me in as a combat Hunter, sir. You're the best Maverick Hunter Commander we've ever had."

"You worthless piece of garbage." I stopped for a second, skull tingling with a growing sense of malice. "No. I can't go insulting garbage that way. Garbage is useful. I've used garbage to blow stuff up before. You, now, I can't see you as more than five-weeks-gone milk. Fighters like you make me want to throw up. Do you know what about you makes me want to throw up, you worthless mass of protocheese?"

I swear he was sweating. Who designs reploids to sweat? "My bad aim and terrible combat ability, sir?"

"Don't try to score points with me, Gouda. Surrendering is one thing. I surrendered once, after they tore off both my arms and shot a hole through my self-detonation system. I can even condone surrendering if it means you get close enough to kill someone. But ditching your friends? No. You're gone. Make me happy and go step on a land mine. When you're done, pack your bags 'cause I'm sending you to the Arctic unit where you can learn how brittle your little details get at forty below. Understand?"

"B-but it was just training! I got a signal, it was important!"

I grinned nastily. "Just training? Is that it?"

I pulled the reploid's sidearm from its holster and pointed it between his eyes, which widened to the size of dinner plates. "Disarm me."

"Commander? What's going on?"

I clicked off the safety. "Disarm me, Corporal, or so help me Light I'll put you in a cheese factory as the milk churning machine."

Resonance's face went through a couple of expressions before landing on determination. Calling back to his textbook-perfect disarm training, the reploid incapacitated my arm and gained control of the weapon in two seconds flat. Then, just like they'd done in every single training session, he handed it back to me so we could practice again.

I took the pistol from him and fired an energy blast past his ear. Waste chemicals abruptly sprinkled the ground between his feet.

When the sadsack excuse for a reploid finally regained control of his tongue, not to mention his bladder, I cut him off with a chop of my hand. "Training stupid makes you fight stupid. When I practiced disarming my instructors, they practiced dodging. You just practiced ditching your team in the middle of a fight to the death with the most powerful machine ever made. Me. Get it?"

The reploid's face went slack, tensed up again, and cycled through a few more changes before I lost patience with his processing speed. I hitched the blast pistol on my belt and walked out of the room while he gibbered.

"My gun—"

Slam! went the door to the rec pod room behind me. "Noobs."

I walked about four steps down the hallway before another reploid ran straight into me. No one catches me flatfooted, not around here, so he bounced off and fell hard on his metal butt.

Poor idiot. Not everyone can walk around MHHQ like a boss.

He recovered in time to watch me walk around him, then jumped to his feet with a rattle and a clank. Rookie armor never fits just right; I hear it's something about cost-effectiveness and life expectancy ratios. It's the kind of stuff X doesn't like to hear about. Anyway, I turned to walk off.

"Commander Zero! Alia's in serious condition in the medical bay!" He scrambled to his feet and tried to grab my hand. This earned him a slap to the face and another visit to the floor.

"Never grab a superior officer, greenhorn. We've seen crappers like you visit Crazytown before, and we're not gonna line up for a sneak attack. You're lucky I didn't shoot you on the spot."

I turned to walk away again. The newbie soldier sputtered and choked behind me. "But—but your friend's in the medical bay!"

My long, blond hair swished back and forth as I sauntered off. "You said 'serious condition.' 'Serious' isn't 'critical.' I can get there by walking before she kicks the bucket."

I left the newbie sitting there watching me, at a loss, while parts of my insides curled in on themselves. Once I had gotten around the corner I took off at a noiseless run. I may not care about Alia too much but hell would break loose if X thought she died thanks to no one paying attention.

Another couple of reploids tried to stop me on the way. One freaky yellow-eyed one almost succeeded, until I stiffarmed her against the wall so all her sciencey papers flew loose.

"Zero! I hear Alia's been transformed in one of X's capsules!" Another officer shouted news at me. I waved at him and ran on by.

Great. Alia got an upgrade and someone shot her up or something on the way back. X was probably already at critical mass. They'd be picking pieces of the shooter out of the bedrock for the next 200 years.

"Hey, watch it you—"

Well, life is hard, and then you die. Then they bring you back, and life is hard again. I pictured the Blue Bomber going nuclear on a Maverick and smiled.

"Commander Zero, hey! Someone told me Commander X—"

That one dropped out of earshot before he finished. What, did he think I'd slow down?

"Zero, I hear X got himself a pe—"

And there went another one. It sounded like he really had something to say, too. I rounded a corner and flared up my dash jets to avoid slamming into Rumble Rhino. He ground out something nearly indecipherable while I escaped.

"Aaaliaokkkckup—"

A quick glance around revealed green ceramic-plated walls and pastel landscapes posing as art. I had officially entered the medical wing of the complex.

The nurses had an absolute fit the first time I ran in here, so naturally I never travel this wing at less than a brisk jog. Breaking the rules once in a while keeps people on their toes. I overheard snippets of conversation from the bystanders too oblivious to sense me coming.

"—said she had an hour to live—whoah!"

"—capsules, but that doesn't make any sense—"

"—burns all over her body! I—ack!"

"—time, brain was just a piece of slag. Hey, you!"

Robo-adrenaline started to race through my internals. None of that sounded good.

"No! I'm serious! At least 15% wider."

"That's why—Zero you **** ****-**** get out of my hospital!"

That last was Lifesaver's human partner, Leon Deckerd, the co-director of the medical labs. He had a PhD in such-and-such and answered any medical questions Lifesaver couldn't handle. He also cussed like a sailor. I never, ever let him look at me on an examination table.

"Zero you hopeless—"

"Code Zero, Code Zero! Door guards at attention!"

That always made me want to laugh. I made so much trouble in here, the medics had their own code for me. Based on the noise level and people going in and out, Operation Room 7 was the place to go to find Alia, so I put on a burst of speed and angled in towards the door.

Abruptly, and for no good reason I could think of, someone yanked the bones out of my body and pulverized my flesh into rubber Jell-O. Or, maybe, they yanked out all of my internal organs and punched a hole in my head. I couldn't really tell for sure; after the first nanosecond I blacked out and lost all memory of ever existing. Again.

And tomorrow I was going to try out X's new metalloid waffle maker. Darn it, life.

G0G0G

I wandered down the hallways aimlessly, feeling oddly disconnected from the events around me. Whether reploids spoke or simply walked on by, I had trouble noticing them through the mist in my brain.

New recruits, new recruits. Where might I find new recruits?

I had spent the previous day working on a revolutionary new version of the Multi-Dimensional Interface. Then, earlier this morning, the voice had come to give me more instructions, refining the settings on the machine, then telling me to find those unlikely to be missed and send them away to increase the power of my link to subspace. New recruits dropped out of the Hunters frequently, I recalled, and certainly I might escape notice for a time if I used one of them. (It occur nevered to me to look outside the base.)

Time. Hahaha. A convenient abstraction for our universe, nothing more. Fully interpreted, the math of my Grand Unified Theory shows that crossing subspace fractures the dimensions and loops time around on itself like an eleven-dimensional Möbius strip. With a strong, stable link across the boundary between universes, anything becomes possible.

Now to make that possibility real! I looked around me, scanning for the new recruits. I knew the signs. Ill-fitting armor, expressions of nervousness and awe—

Nothing. Nothing at all. I had too much difficulty making sense of images. The aftereffects of communing with the voice can make ordinary function extraordinarily frustrating.

At this point I walked into a wall. I noticed this event only because of the sound of my newest Multi-Dimensional Interface dropping to the floor. The machine clattered angrily against shining metal tile and came to a sullen stop.

Panic eating at my brain, I dropped to my knees and grabbed the device in both hands. Shaped like a little metal box on the outside, the MDI's inner workings contained no less than four separate systems with vibrational fragility. I feared the worst, but concentrating closely on the little digital readout, I convinced myself that nothing had gone permanently wrong. Perhaps a change in the calibration. I tweaked a knob just so, and the numbers on the MDI's face shifted to more comfortable positions. I thought I heard it sigh.

"Excuse me, sir. Are you feeling normal?"

I looked up, and up, and saw a figure towering above me. The mist kept me from making out many details. "You very are tall."

Another tall figure behind him started to chuckle but snorted to a stop. The first figure folded its arms and looked down its nose at me. Dimly, I realized they looked tall because I was still hunched over on the floor.

"We're going to take you to the infirmary. Do you understand?"

For a second his features came sharply into mental focus. My brain operated with crystal clarity, and I glimpsed the second figure, standing behind the first. The mental click pictured before I reeled again in stupor.

Hahaha. The curtain of fog had descended once again, but my mind's eye saw the future with perfect clarity. I fumbled with the MDI, pressing a few buttons as if by accident, and handed it up to the figure above me. "I'll go to the infirmary. Back this take to my quarters?"

The soldier standing in front made a face I couldn't interpret and made as if to give the device to the one behind him, a new recruit. Then he stopped, glanced back at me, and down at the device. Without another word, the creature reached down and hauled me to my feet by the upper arm. "Sparky, call for backup. I don't like the looks of this."

"Sparky" hesitated, then fumbled with a device on his hip. He unbuckled the thing and raised it to his mouth. "This is Sporkachev calling for backup in sector, um, G-3. Uummm, suspicious suspect in a lab coat."

Voices on the other end of the line laughed. "This is Ruby. We'll be right there, Sparky. Hold on tight."

I glared blearily at the figures. Somehow my perfect future had been aborted. "This isn't right at all. How dare you."

"Just doing our job, sir. If you're in the early stages of the virus, we need to keep you from doing anything you'll regret." The soldier in front forcibly turned me around and pulled my arms behind me. By the time I comprehended what he had done, my wrists had been pulled into a total paralysis gauntlet.

Electrical currents assaulted me; I lost all control of my body. Rage fumed from my brilliant, trapped mind as the guard put me into a kneeling position. I recognized with impotent fury the noise of my newest MDI being set gently on the floor. "This doesn't look like a bomb, but on the other claw, Sparky doesn't look like a real Hunter. Just give 'em time, that's my motto. Or, uh, don't, if it's a bomb. Bombs explode."

Silence followed the guard's remark. I struggled to listen through the haze around my senses, but the sounds of the two reploids and their voices had vanished. Why would they stop and stand so absurdly still after all that? A legion of pi thousand wall-eyed, even the fraction demons crawled out of my mouth and invaded the galaxy to rape its hot, steaming muffins. I recognized that the hallucinations had started and forced myself into unconsciousness.

LGLGL

Watching from a distant corner of the world, I shook my head and sighed. So much work to do, and so little time. Less than ever, sadly, after what had just happened in MHHQ.

Dr. Gate knelt stiffly on the floor, paralyzed and perhaps unconscious. The Evil Energy readings had been coming from him after all. Had I only come along farther with the detection technology since the last time, I might have helped my son stop all this trouble from the beginning. Now I had so little time left to warn him.

Sparky and the other guard, whose name escaped me, had disappeared from this universe. A spike of Evil Energy readings appeared on my detectors almost simultaneously. Perhaps using the Evil Energy as a power source, Gate had succeeded in creating an area-of-effect subspace teleporter. Moreover, he had somehow avoided getting caught in the effects despite his proximity to the device at the moment of teleportation. The possibilities made my gut wrench with fear.

I relaxed my focus on the camera feed and two others immediately grabbed me. My son X had collapsed in his chair at Alia's bedside, while Zero had crashed to the floor in the middle of his mad dash to the infirmary. I felt a stab of terror pierce my ancient soul.

What had that Gate done?