Cyborg Legacy

by Lindsay Buroker

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Foreword

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Cyborg Legacy

  (a Fallen Empire novel)

  by Lindsay Buroker

  Copyright © 2017 Lindsay Buroker

  Illustration Copyright © 2016 Tom Edwards

  TomEdwardsDesign.com

  Foreword

  Thank you for picking up Cyborg Legacy. This is the ninth novel in my Fallen Empire universe, but it stars a new hero and is designed to stand alone. If you’re a new reader, welcome! If you’ve read the original series, thanks for coming back for more. As I said, Jasim is a new hero, but fan-favorite Leonidas is along for the ride. He’s still kicking butt, even if he has a few more gray hairs (don’t mention those hairs, though—he’s sensitive about them). For those keeping track, this adventure takes place about four years after the events of End Game. I hope you enjoy the story!

  As always, I had help in putting this novel together. Please let me thank Sarah Engelke and Rue Silver, my tireless beta readers, Shelley Holloway, my equally tireless editor, and Tom Edwards, my cover designer (I’m not sure about his tiredness level, but he illustrates these covers very quickly, so it’s possible he’s a cyborg).

  Now, please jump in...

  Chapter 1

  A soft hiss-thunk sounded as Jasim Antar fastened his helmet, the final piece of his combat armor, and walked out of his cabin on the Interrogator. He headed for Navigation and Communications where his lone companion on the journey sat in the pilot’s seat. Knitting. Jasim grabbed a blazer rifle from the weapons locker on the way into NavCom.

  When he entered, Maddy lowered her long needles and an amorphous purple and green blob that would, he had been informed, grow into a scarf to match the hat she had already knitted him. Her gray hair was swept back with a clip, and she wore a loose sweater of her own design, the sleeves pushed up to her elbows, the front featuring a cheerful orange bird perched on a twig. The weapons belt secured at her waist, a blazer pistol longer than her forearm hanging in the holster, contrasted oddly with the otherwise kindly grandmother visage.

  “Ready for a tough one, big man?” Maddy asked.

  Jasim snorted. Big man. Hardly. When he’d applied to join the Cyborg Corps, back when the empire had dominated the system and the imperial army had been a great entity with headquarters on every planet, he’d cracked his spine trying to stand tall enough to make the minimum six-foot height requirement. He was an inch too short, and he was fairly certain the recruiting doctor had only allowed him in because the war had been ramping up, and he’d had a quota to make. Few men had been crazy enough to sign up for the extensive surgeries and body alterations that came with being turned into an imperial cyborg.

  “I’m ready,” Jasim said. He’d never thought he would miss the war and the killing—the sun gods knew he’d tried to get out of the unit more than once—but at least he’d had a purpose then. Now…

  “I’ll do my flyby to make sure the ship is there,” Maddy said, turning toward the control panel. Her needles and project went into the yarn-filled knitting basket next to her seat.

  “Don’t get too close to the compound. He’ll have enhanced hearing, just like me. I’d rather not warn him I’m coming by buzzing his living room window.”

  “You needn’t tell me how to do my job, dear,” Maddy said, swooping low over the tents, metal buildings, and salvage yards that dominated this part of Temperance. Most parts of Temperance. Targos Moon had not been doing well since the empire fell, with the dozens of governments that had sprouted up too busy squabbling over resources to worry about their people, and Temperance was controlled by a mafia clan that wasn’t reputed to be any better. “I’ve been flying since before your mother was paddling your bare bottom.”

  “My mother died before I was old enough to need paddling. I grew up on the streets of New Jerome with my older sisters.”

  “Well, I’m sure paddling was involved. You have a naughty personality.”

  Jasim arched his eyebrows. “I’m certain I’ve never done anything to suggest that to you.” Granted, he occasionally played a prank or two on those who deserved it, but even if Maddy had deserved pranks, he would be afraid to try anything on her, since she was his boss’s mother-in-law. Any woman who cheerfully allowed her daughter to marry a man known as The Pulverizer was not to be trifled with.

  “I’ve read your record. Your last pilot complained about run-ins with something called a whoopee cushion.”

  “Actually, it was a splat pad, and that was only one time. And he deserved it. He was smooching with a prostitute in NavCom when I was getting shot at and needed a pickup. I trust you won’t be unreliable like that.”

  “I suppose that depends on how handsome the prostitutes here are.” Maddy winked at him.

  “Pilots,” he grumbled. It didn’t matter how many children or grandchildren they had. They were all half-crazy. If not all crazy. He wouldn’t be surprised if Maddy came from the word mad rather than being a shortening of her name, Madeline.

  He got another wink before Maddy returned her focus to the control panel. A three-legged dog roaming a street threw back his head and barked at them as they flew overhead. The cloudy green sky was clear of other spaceships. Few people had a reason to visit the unincorporated part of Temperance. Jasim wagered most of the citizens wished they lived somewhere else. Where else, he didn’t know. Most former imperial citizens who hadn’t turned traitor and fought for the Alliance now had trouble getting citizenship on their pretty core planets.

  “There she is,” Maddy said, nodding toward one of several holodisplays, this one showing the ship’s port camera feed.

  The sleek black hull of a ten-man star yacht rested on a dirt lot surrounded by a brick and barbed-wire fence. Less than a year old, the gleaming spaceship stuck out outrageously in the impoverished neighborhood. Jasim was surprised the locals hadn’t broken it down into pieces to sell, but supposed the presence of the man living in the squat cinderblock structure attached to the yard might have intimidated them.

  “What a beaut,” Maddy said, eyeing the yacht. “I looked at the specs earlier. She’s got real showers instead of saniboxes, and there are auto-massagers and saunas in the lavatories.”

  “You don’t think The Pulverizer would put a sauna in the lav on this ship for you?” Jasim asked.

  “Please, he’s a scrimper. Besides, where would it go in that tiny lav? The toilet would have to be inside the sauna for it to fit. And an auto-massager?” She sighed wistfully and looked at Jasim’s arms. “I’d ask you to put those meat slabs of yours to work in a useful manner, but I don’t want to have my bones crushed.”

  “Meat slabs?”

  “What do you call them?” She waved to his arms.

  The armor hid the thick muscles at the moment, but Jasim supposed she’d seen him in a T-shirt often enough in the few weeks they had been working together to remember them well. He’d caught her investigating other parts of him, too, usually when she didn’t think he was looking. It probably wasn’t appropriate to think of his boss’s mother-in-law as lecherous.

  “I call them arms,” Jasim said.

  “How insufficient.” Maddy whistled cheerfully and adjusted their course. “I’ll get within a half-mile, and you’ll have to rappel out. There’s no place to land, and I woul
dn’t want to in this neighborhood even if I could. Probably wouldn’t take the hoodlums thirty seconds before they descended on us and tried to tear off the panels for scrap.”

  “Just open the hatch, and I’ll jump out.” Jasim waved at the altimeter to indicate that he could handle the thirty- or forty-foot drop.

  “Ah, right. I forgot. You’re like an android.”

  Jasim frowned but didn’t bother correcting her. He’d tried numerous times in the years since the war ended, but he hadn’t had much luck changing people’s assumptions about cyborgs. At least she didn’t call him “mech,” the derisive nickname many people had for cyborgs. Not that many used the term to their faces.

  “Just fly over one of the streets,” Jasim said, turning toward the exterior hatch that opened up from the ship’s single corridor. “Preferably not one of those alleys full of dog piss and potholes.”

  “I’ve been to Temperance before. I don’t think that’s dog piss.”

  “Lovely.”

  Jasim walked the three steps to the hatch—the Interrogator was a modern ship with a fast engine, good shields, and impressive weapons, but it was definitely not luxurious or large. As he waited for Maddy to find a spot, he silently ordered his helmet display to turn on. The neural net touching his scalp in several spots read the command and obeyed, and readings that ranged from sensor data about his surroundings, to the suit’s integrity, to his body’s vital statistics appeared along the sides of his faceplate. They did not interfere with his vision, and it was easy to look through them instead of focusing on them during a battle. Everything appeared normal, and his heartbeat thumped along at a perfectly normal rhythm despite his nervousness about the target he would confront on this particular mission.

  He checked his rifle and the smaller blazer weapons that could pop out of the arms of his suit on command. He doubted thugs would leap out at him as soon as he landed—most people fled from men wearing the distinctive red combat armor of the Cyborg Corps—but when he was operating on his own like this, he couldn’t be too careful. Maddy might provide some aerial backup if he got in trouble, but that wasn’t her job. She was supposed to fly him to the deadbeats, tow the ships they collected if necessary, arrange to have them transported back to headquarters, and fly him to the next mission. That was it. She also, Jasim suspected, reported back to her son-in-law regularly and would let The Pulverizer know if Jasim absconded with any of the goods he was supposed to be retrieving.

  A boom came from outside, and the ship tilted alarmingly.

  The stabilizers in Jasim’s leg armor kept him upright without trouble, but the litany of un-grandmotherly curses that came from NavCom was alarming. He’d never heard her denigrate the size of the reproductive organs of all three sun gods before, not all at once.

  “Problem?” Jasim asked.

  “Some idiot with a grenade launcher is firing at us from a rooftop.” Even as she finished speaking, the Interrogator banked hard.

  This time, Jasim braced himself by pressing his gauntleted hands against the bulkhead. In space, artificial gravity would usually keep the ship stable, but down here, it was more akin to being in an airplane. An airplane that was under fire.

  As the ship rose and looped back the way it had come, Maddy said, “Hold back on opening the hatch. I had to raise the shields.”

  As the deck shifted and tilted, Jasim made his way back to NavCom and looked at the view screen. He was in time to see a pack of men and women in baggy, mismatched clothing pointing weapons at them from the flat rooftop of a three-story tenement building. There was more than one grenade launcher among the group, along with everything from blazer rifles to shotguns to a longbow that someone looked to have made by hand. Its owner couldn’t have been more than twelve.

  Maddy wore a determined expression as she arrowed the ship toward the rooftop.

  “You’re not going to fire, are you?” Jasim gripped her shoulder, careful, as always, not to squeeze too hard. In addition to having the strength that his cyborg implants gave him, combat armor amplified the wearer’s power.

  “Nobody fires at The Pulverizer’s ships without receiving retaliation,” Maddy said, speaking it like a mantra. Maybe it was underlined in the company rulebook somewhere.

  “You’ll blow up that whole building.”

  “It might improve the neighborhood.”

  “There’ll be people in it. Women and children, maybe. Grandchildren,” he added, since she had mentioned having more than a dozen of those herself.

  She kept flying, looking determined to blow up the entire building, if not the city block.

  “Maddy,” he said quietly, giving her a slight warning squeeze, even though threatening her would not be good for his career. He did not want to wrest the controls from her, but he would if he had to.

  She growled, but did not fire as they swooped low over the rooftop. The Interrogator received more fire from the group of thugs, bullets and blazer beams pinging off their shields. Those weapons wouldn’t do any damage. The grenades were another story. Maddy banked hard to avoid another one that was launched from the rooftop. It blew up to their starboard side amid a cloud of black smoke. The ship rocked, but the shields remained near full power.

  “What kind of cyborg soldier are you?” Maddy asked, scowling at him as she swooped left and right to make a challenging target.

  “A retired one,” Jasim said, though it seemed an odd word to use. After all, he was only twenty-seven. He’d only been in for three years before the war ended. “And not one who ever targeted civilians,” he added firmly.

  “That’s not what the stories about the Cyborg Corps say.”

  Jasim pressed his lips together. “I know what the stories say.”

  “I wasn’t just spouting nonsense back there. We have a company policy that anyone who tries to damage one of our ships or one of our people gets handled—like a straw bale on a rifle range. Our logo is on the side of the ship where anyone can see it. We can’t let word get back of our weakness. The Pulverizer has a reputation.”

  “I’m aware of it. Drop me on the roof, and I’ll deal with them.” Jasim felt like a thug when he said such things, but he couldn’t object too much to using force on people who shot at him. He just didn’t want to take out innocent people lounging on their couches and reading news holos on the first floor. Not everyone who lived in this neighborhood was a felon. He knew all too well what it was like to grow up in a place like this and have no way to escape it.

  “I’ll have to lower shields for you to jump out,” Maddy said.

  “I’ll be quick.” He released her shoulder with a pat and headed back to the hatch.

  “I’ll have Earl send the repair bill to you.”

  “Earl?”

  “My son-in-law.”

  “No wonder he goes by The Pulverizer.”

  “No insulting the family, cyborg, or you might not get picked up again.”

  “I’ll remember that.” Jasim returned to the hatch and touched the control panel on the bulkhead beside it, calling up the forward camera on the display. Between the shock absorbers in his armor and his mostly synthetic bones and joints, he could survive if he jumped and missed the rooftop, but seeing him splat against a brick wall wouldn’t drive fear into the hearts of their attackers. “Ready when you are.”

  “Lowering shields,” Maddy said.

  The people on the rooftop jumped and pointed, aiming their weapons eagerly. They probably couldn’t believe the ship was coming back so they would get another chance at it. Missing sauna or not, Jasim knew the Interrogator’s parts could bring in good money on the black market. Or maybe the farmers’ market—he doubted the authorities cared much about policing illegal salvage here, and it wouldn’t surprise him to see stolen fuel cells and tube couplers for sale in a kiosk next to tomatoes and asteroid fruit.

  Jasim tapped the controls, and the hatch slid open. Maddy hadn’t slowed down for her approach, and wind buffeted his armor and tugged at the rifle slung acros
s his torso on a strap.

  He was about to jump out when Maddy shouted, “One’s firing,” and banked hard.

  Jasim, already crouched to spring, had to adjust his aim. He jumped from the ship, leaping outward instead of simply dropping down. More wind railed at him but not enough to alter the descent of a two-hundred-pound man in full combat armor.

  As he landed on the corner of the rooftop, he planned to charge straight toward the men and women and deal with them as rapidly as possible—his armor could deflect a lot of bullets and blazer bolts, but it wasn’t as impervious as the ship’s shields and would weaken eventually. But part of the old building gave way under his feet, and he had to react quickly to keep from plummeting through to the top floor. His charge turned into a roll away from the hole crumbling open underneath him, and crimson blazer bolts streaked past above him.

  “Combat armor,” someone whispered, Jasim’s superior hearing catching the words from across the rooftop. “It’s worth a fortune.”

  “Get him. Get him good!”

  Jasim recovered from his ungainly landing, leaped to his feet, and raced toward the pack. Not everyone agreed with the speakers, and some of the smarter thugs were already scattering, eyes wide as they took in his red armor. Several, however, stood their ground, unleashing their rifles and pistols at him. There wasn’t any cover on the rooftop, except for an open trapdoor that didn’t look like it could take a windy day, much less weapons fire. Jasim didn’t bother dodging, but he kept an eye on the readout on his faceplate, reporting on hits and giving him armor integrity updates. He almost laughed when a crooked arrow bounced off his shoulder.

  He crossed the roof in a second and leaped into the middle of his foes. Even without the combat armor, his enhancements gave him speed and strength that unaltered humans couldn’t match. He knocked two men off the roof and grabbed the grenade launcher from a third before the thugs registered what was going on and tried to run out of his reach. He gripped the grenade launcher in both hands, and metal squealed as the frame bent, then snapped. He threw the pieces to the ground and knocked more people from the rooftop, some flying twenty feet before they tumbled over the side and to the ground below.