“Fortunato!” reverberated in her head, like a dozen tennis balls bouncing in an industrial-sized wok.
Lorelei stood in statuesque rictus, implacable as a machine; fitting, since she was anywhere from forty-five to sixty-percent machine, depending on personal definition and depth of observation. Her powerfully-hinged feet were perched with sparrow-like balance on a promontory of rough, jagged ice. Her arms, either coated or composed of titanium alloy, were extended like Moses parting the Red Sea, and from each finger erupted blue-white veins of thoroughly amoral electricity: Jove’s own bolts flung out like spring-action spiderwebs, both rigid and alive with fury. Her jaw was set firm as the immotile ice.
Her honey-brown eyes, like pools of ancient amber, were stuck wide open, rusted at the hinges by frozen and now blown-away tears.
At the back of the base of her neck, a single light on her access panel was blinking green. All systems were go.
The lightning from her fingertips stretched all the way out to the extremes of Europa’s atmosphere in manners most terrifying, churning the normally banal firmament into a sulfurous, supersonic, utterly indifferent hell-scape, fully capable of casual genocide. She was a metal tree, the bolts her immense branches, and the apocalyptic storm above her leaves, soaking up life wherever they found it. She had no roots, however. She was standing on ice.
Lorelei had a very lyric disposition whenever she was performing mindless tasks.
Inside her head, gears ticked away. She had a brain, like any mortal might, but Lorelei’s lump of fat and mucus and dendrites was augmented by wires, cogs, and readout. Nestled among the folds of her brain-and-then-some, number-engraved gears were counting down. When they reached their zero, something clicked, something else stopped ticking, and the blinking green light on her access panel stopped blinking. It was solid green now.
In less than a millisecond, the lightning was gone. Lorelei’s fingers contracted like an old arthritic’s, and her petrified eyes ogled at them like strangers. Her very human lips twisted in an ugly amalgam of fury, offense, and horror. An awful compulsion overtook her, to rub at her rusted eyes. She knew it would do no good: she had to oil them first then gently dab them clean with her wash cloth. But despite all logic, the compulsion was there, and it wouldn’t go away.
Was this a human impulse? Or part of her programming? Lorelei was asking herself this sort of question all the time.
Above, though severed from its source, the storm rolled on.
She could see her clearly, like a hologram, standing before her. The space ship captain, attentive and solid as a statue, staring down the planet’s merciless atmosphere with the conviction of an old man staring down his younger, stronger, more violent son. There was no fear on her face; apprehension seemed hidden even from her eyes. The illusion before Lorelei was insubstantial, but the woman it represented was as solid as granite.
Then the illusion shifted like a cloud formation, melting and molding into something else. In a few seconds, a different woman was standing before her.
“Fortunato.”
The name was hissed, a curse more vile than any she might invent. The source of the hiss, she knew, was standing behind her. She refused to turn around, refused to show weakness. Instead, she answered, “Show me the captain again.”
The illusion, as stubborn as its creator, refused to change.
The hiss spoke, “She did this. Not you.” It was a round, warm, dark murmur, a comforting voice. It was a very human voice, she thought, despite the one who employed it. She felt a scaly hand on her right shoulder, the claws making gentle divots in her skin. “Say it,” the voice warmly commanded.
Lorelei wanted to close her eyes, but knew she couldn’t. She didn’t sigh, didn’t take an unnecessarily deep breath. The hiss knew all these tricks, meant to convey a lightness she didn’t feel. Instead, she let a controlled, calm voice answer, “She did this. Not me.”
She could feel him smiling behind her. “You’re more a slave than I am. Remember that.” his other claw appeared on the left side of her vision, holding a small bottle of oil and a newly-washed cloth. She took them and began gently dabbing at her eyes.
Slowly, Carnifex crept into view. His serpentine, fishlike body was hunched over, shrinking to make himself appear smaller than he already was. His left knee, unlike the rest of his green-scaled skin, was brown and bloated, and he hobbled weakly each time he walked on it. His hands were small but strong, though they and their claws were nowhere near as powerful as his massive jaws and the two rows of serrated fangs that filled them. His bulbous blue eyes seemed vacuous and empty as a stockyard beast, but Lorelei knew them to be filled with both deep wisdom and sharp cunning. Carnifex could be as kind and comforting as a father when he chose, but he also had a vicious streak that made her flesh crawl (at least, what flesh she had).
Right now, all of his venom was aimed at the illusion before them. “There were people in that ship,” he explained, redundantly. “You know that, yes?”
“Yes,” she answered, also redundantly. The middle-aged woman standing before her was a study in disharmony. While Lorelei was half-machine, everything was a product of considered design: smooth lines and idealized function blended perfectly with the good gifts of nature. Carnifex, though unique in shape and damaged by time, was beautiful both in his form and his utter primacy on the planet that was unquestionably the mother of himself and his fallen species. In Fortunato, however, the Universe showed its propensity for chaos.
One of her eyes had been replaced with a goggle-like sensor, alternately red or green or black, determined by either its current function or her current mood. Thin, compressed lips hid parti-colored teeth: ivory, gold, onyx, titanium, and even one of tin. Fully half her scalp had been replaced with a bronze sheet, which Lorelei knew hid a layer of blue scales of unknown origin. One ear was coated in gold, the other replaced with a small, stationary radar dish of some kind.
Her neck was actual leather, complete with a zipper at its front. Neither Lorelei nor Carnifex knew what was behind that zipper: Carnifex had attempted to discover the secret once, and paid dearly for his presumption. Her robes, both copper and powder blue, were sewn into the leather throat: presumably, Fortunato never undressed. Her arms were entirely mechanical, but her hands were scaly and clawed, almost identical to Carnifex’. Her legs (what could be seen of them beneath the robes) looked perfectly human, though the bones within had been replaced with titanium rods and gears. Contrary to all this, upon her feet she wore a pair of simple blue slippers: light, functional, and comfortable.
Lorelei looked upon the woman’s face and saw neither sympathy for others nor the desire of it for herself. She saw determination for some unknown goal, something that had been inexplicably hidden from her all her life.
Or had it?
Out of nowhere, Lorelei thought of her thirteenth birthday. Alone together on this Europa, Carnifex had prepared a feast of waxy fruits and sugar bread. Fortunato had been sealed away in her lab for a week, and the two had been left to their own devices. It was never clear which one had been meant to look after the other. Carnifex had been the same size since he was two, and Lorelei was boasting that she would soon be taller than he was. He laughed at this, but she now saw through the lens of history a distant sorrow in his eyes, covered by his crinkled ocular film lids.
Carnifex stood before her, more or less blocking the illusion. “What are you thinking of, Lori?”
Her brown eyes were wide and vacant, lost in the past. “Birthdays.”
Why had she thought of this? In an instant, with the speed of a superior processing unit, she considered her birthdays: fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth. In each, Fortunato had been elsewhere, in each Carnifex had been with her, reminding her that they were the same age for only two more months, before his own birthday would once again make him the elder and the wiser.
He could not read minds (as far as she knew) but Carnifex seemed to know all the same. “You’re going in the wrong direction.”
Before she could quite make sense of Carnifex’ sentence, the illusion stepped around him into plain view. Fortunato’s previously blank face contracted into magnetic fury, and her eyes moved toward the serpent’s back.
This was no longer an illusion.
The old woman’s lips parted, her eye narrowed, and her sensor-lens changed to red as she snarled “Carnifex.”
A hissing sound was heard, more mechanical than biological, and Lorelei’s friend collapsed to the ground.