She wasn't a dog in the literal sense, though she looked like one at first glance—a mangy, scarred Belgian Malinois with one organic eye and one that glowed a dull, flickering red. She was a "retro-fit," a war surplus K9 unit from the failed Lunar Pacification Campaign, dumped into the city's scrapheaps and salvaged by Kingpouge's fixer. Her original programming had been for loyalty and violence. But decades of street survival and exposure to rogue data-streams had done something unexpected: she had learned to think. To feel, in her own jagged way.
In that instant, the Silk Worms' breaching charge blew the chamber doors apart. Kingpouge reached for his concealed plasma pistol, but Laika was faster. She didn't attack him. Instead, she lunged for the safe, her metal-reinforced jaws tearing through the biometric lock like wet paper. She grabbed the data-slate—the whole of his empire, the kill-codes, the blackmail files, the fortune—and leaped out the shattered window into the rain-slicked dark. kingpouge laika
No one knew his real name. Some said he was a disgraced bio-engineer from the Ulan-Zone; others whispered he was the first successful fusion of human and AI consciousness, gone rogue. What was known was this: Kingpouge controlled the flow of memory-drugs, illegal cyber-augments, and stolen dreams through the city's seventeen subterranean levels. He was ruthless, precise, and utterly without mercy. She wasn't a dog in the literal sense,
He turned, a flicker of annoyance crossing his scarred face. "I said heel, girl." But decades of street survival and exposure to
