William 874X_Book 5 of Cyborgs_Mankind Redefined

by Donna McDonald

  “Your involvement in her mission was implied by her explanation,” Nero insisted.

  “As a civilian, you can’t completely understand how loyalty in the military works, so I won’t debate Aja’s and Meara’s with you. However, because of our original New World Companion connection, those two women will never go anywhere in this world that I won’t be with them in some manner. No one can turn that off inside me. It’s hardwired in some of my broken cybernetics. Meara and Aja both willingly chose to keep the connection. I will not dishonor their choice just because you’re worried. You need to learn to trust Aja knows what she’s doing.”

  “Lucy, it’s not like we intend to go drag them back. If we wanted to find them, we could find them. We want to know they’re safe. We want to know where they went and why they left,” Peyton said calmly.

  Lucy rounded on Peyton, meeting him glare for glare. “No, you want to believe you have the right to direct every aspect of their lives like you do your men, who still hang on your every word as law. I have two words to answer that, Captain Elliot—tough shit. Army doesn’t answer to Marines. Not then… and not now.”

  Eric squeezed her knee under the table to warn her as the door opened. “Speaking of tough shit…”

  Will walked in and took a seat without speaking.

  An angry Kyra moved past him and stood with her arms crossed. “Meara drugged Will last night,” she informed the group. “The combination of King’s concoction and the sleep drug made Will extremely sick. It’s going to take another full day to get it all out of his system. Why in the world would Meara do that to him?”

  “Can Will easily track her whereabouts with his new neural abilities?” Lucy asked.

  Kyra nodded. “Certainly… and across a fairly extensive range. Why do you ask?”

  “That’s why she did it,” Lucy concluded, crossing her arms as well.

  “Meara drugged Will to keep him from following her and Aja?”

  Lucy nodded as she met Kyra’s irritated stare. “Yes—exactly. But knowing them as I do, I think it’s far more concerning that both Meara and Aja took the time to say goodbye to the men in their lives before they left. They were programmed not to get that involved with any male.”

  Lucy watched the men in question squirm in their seats.

  “How can I be involved in a liar’s life?” Nero demanded, lifting a hand in the air.

  “Probably the very same way a cyborg like Aja can be in the life of someone who can shut her down whenever he wants. Power works both ways, Dr. Bastion.”

  Lucy knew her shot had hit home when Nero turned away. Will, on the other hand, said nothing to her about Meara’s betrayal. He merely gave her a mean look. Meara’s soft spot for the man was going to be trouble in the long run.

  Lucy’s soft spot for Cassandra made her want to beat up on Will for not caring enough about either female.

  “I heard Cassandra asked you for a favor, Will. Why don’t you tell Peyton what she wanted? Or were you going to pretend it hadn’t happened?”

  “Is that it?” Will rasped the question out through a scratchy throat still sore from all the regurgitation he’d done. “Fuck. They went after Rio Sanchez, didn’t they?”

  Nero rounded back to hear what was being said. “Who and what is a Rio Sanchez? Is he another missing cyborg?”

  Eric grunted. “No. Rio Sanchez is a UCN special projects engineer who’s been missing for the last four months. He’s also the man Will’s wife divorced him to marry.”

  “You’re pretty well informed for someone not involved,” Peyton said with a glare.

  Eric chuckled. “Meara was chattier than usual because she was mad at Will for saying no.” He glanced down the table at Will. “Meara said you told your ex-wife you wouldn’t help her.”

  “I didn’t tell Cassandra no,” Will said firmly. “I said I couldn’t commit—that we couldn’t commit.”

  Lucy snorted. “Oh, stop with the word games. Let’s say it plainly… you decided to punish Cassandra for giving up on you. You were going to let her new husband remain lost.”

  “No. None of my actions were geared towards hurting Cassandra. Punishing her in any manner would be illogical. I even told her I thought she did the right thing in moving the fuck on with her life,” Will said stiffly.

  Lucy leaned his direction and stared as hard as she could. “Pretending you’re nothing more than an unfeeling cyborg might have worked if I hadn’t seen you with your tongue down Meara’s throat.”

  “Pervert,” Will said while he glared. “Couldn’t you have looked away? And for your information, there was no tongue. I think I would have known if there’d been tongue.”

  He ran a hand over his now aching head. “Fuck. She should have waited. If Meara’s gone looking for Sanchez, I’m going to kick her red-headed ass and make her stupid step-dancing robots help me.”

  Grinning, Lucy leaned back in the chair. “Better save your ass-kicking boots for yourself. Meara likely would have gone after Rio Sanchez under the right circumstances, but she and Aja are doing something else. Congratulations, Will, you’re going to get by with being a dick to Cassandra after all. Meara isn’t going to be here to stop you.”

  “Will you stop saying that? I wasn’t being a dick to her—or to anyone,” Will argued. He waved weakly in Peyton’s general direction. “I was going to talk to Peyton. Everyone else around here seems to think he’s in charge of all fucking rescue missions. I was going to ask what he thought and then call Cassandra back.”

  “Bullshit,” Lucy spat the word. “You got yourself fucking cyborg drunk trying to ease your guilty feelings. And for your information, Captain Talon, not everyone around here thinks Peyton is their leader.”

  Lucy heard Peyton’s heavy sigh, but now she didn’t care. No wonder Meara had done what she had. Hell. She glared at Will. “I respect Peyton’s opinion, but I’m not taking orders from anyone anymore. Doctor, cyborg, or fucking UCN leader—I trust no one that much. I certainly don’t expect it from the women who broke every damn rule in the book trying to set me free when the rest of the world wanted me dead.”

  Kyra sighed heavily. “Lucy, please. No one is going to make anyone do anything. Just tell us Aja and Meara are okay. That’s what’s important.”

  Lucy turned to Kyra. “I agree, but you need to understand that nothing was going to stop them from going… nor will it stop them next time. Aja and Meara are doing what they trained for all those years on the run to do—what we three have promised ourselves to do every time this situation comes up. This is what cyborg redemption looks like for us, Kyra. All the people in this room need to accept it.”

  Lucy stared hard when Kyra’s eyes narrowed. Good, she thought. Let the woman figure it out because the men in the room were clueless.

  “Redemption? And just what the hell do you mean by that?” Nero demanded, finally losing all patience.

  “Nero… blaming Lucy for Aja leaving won’t bring her back, and you know what they’re both doing. Just calm down and think,” Kyra ordered as she lifted her chin in Lucy’s direction. “Aja and Meara have found more New World Companions. They’ve gone to try and free them. Am I right, Lucy?”

  Lucy held Kyra’s stare, saying nothing in reply. She could do it all day. Eric’s throat clearing brought her gaze to his. “Enough time has passed for them to be well out of the range of any scanner. It will take hours to track them down once they stop moving. The risks of Meara and Aja getting stopped now are low. It’s not disloyal to tell Kyra and Peyton the truth. They’re genuinely worried.”

  Lucy stared into Eric’s kind eyes. He was really the only male she trusted. She nodded once and turned to Kyra. “Okay… yes,” she said. “Aja and Meara went to free more New World Companions.”

  She turned and glared at Will. “From what Eric told me, Meara was looking for Sanchez behind your back when she found the New World Companions instead. I guess that leaves Cassandra shit out of luck for finding her husband until Meara gets back to finis
h the job. So this is why I said you got your fucking way after all.”

  Will leaned on the table and put his head in hand. “The red-haired devil’s not even here and she’s still driving me batshit crazy. I swear I didn’t fucking say no to Cassandra. I just needed time to figure things out. Jesus… can’t I get a break?”

  There was silence after Will’s outburst, but it was obvious tensions were still too high for anyone to think clearly. Eric decided to do what was needed to keep the team in the room being a team. He chose to start with the most penitent person in the room.

  “Hey, Will… can you seriously do everything Meara can?” Eric asked.

  Will looked at Kyra who nodded to him and then back at Eric. “What can Meara do that’s so special?”

  “How about finding you anywhere you go?” Eric asked vaguely, grinning back at a slowly grinning Will.

  “Damn it, Eric. You snitch.”

  “Damn it, Lucy. I’m not a snitch.”

  Punting the truth for the good of everyone didn’t hurt until Lucy punched his arm. His team-building exercise might have netted him a trip to Seetha for repairs.

  Meara and Aja were walking the perimeter of the location for the fourth time in the last twenty-four hours.

  They were keeping themselves half a mile away from both the building and the fenced-in grounds. Outside of the occasional person climbing out of an air transport now and again, no further activity was happening in the yard.

  Whatever was going on was obviously happening inside the building, but they hadn’t survived all those years of running by being stupid. Going inside would be best done with other cyborgs backing them up.

  The buzzing in Meara’s head suddenly intensified and then simply shut off after she took a few steps. It was the first time since her upgrades that everything in her head was absolutely quiet.

  Meara reached out and grasped Aja’s arm in alarm. “The brain buzzing fecking stopped,” she said. Letting go of Aja, Meara backtracked her steps. She had to move out beyond the half-mile mark before the buzzing resumed.

  “What is it?” Aja asked.

  “I think they’re jamming my neural processor somehow. When I get too close, the buzzing in my head stops. Ya think that would be a good thing, but it scares me shitless that it can be done. How can they have already figured out how to shut down Kyra’s work?”

  “Maybe the silence is because you’ve connected to everything within range inside the perimeter?” Aja offered.

  “If that were true, I’d be able to access information from at least some of the machines in the building and I can’t see one of them. The buzzing resumes when I get outside the half-mile line ya marked off,” Meara said.

  “Okay. Given all that, we must assume they have jammed your neural network with intent. Do we continue our surveillance or call for help?” Aja asked.

  When another, larger air transport dropped from the sky to the parking area, Meara looked in the direction of the location it was landing. Pulling out a set of portable optics from a hidden inside pocket, she slipped the device over her head. With the small eyepiece in place over her best eye, she looked at their target and zoomed in close.

  She watched two men in suits climbing from a luxury ground transport. Behind them, two attractive women followed.

  The women were dressed in strapless sundresses. Despite the cold chill in the air, no coats were in sight. Fecking thoughtless bastards. Just because the females were running programming didn’t mean the cold wasn’t seeping into their bones.

  Meara flipped up the eyepiece and looked at Aja. “Unless ya think real women would be fecking stupid enough to wear strapless dresses in this kind of weather, I just saw two New World Companions walking docilely behind two white-coated men.”

  Aja looked off into the distance. She didn’t need the optics. One of her eyes was already cybernetic. Her slightly damaged eye from a fight had been plucked from her head during one of their many New World Companion upgrades. Cyber scientists had replaced it even though she’d begged them not to do that to her. It was last time she’d begged her captors for anything.

  “Who is skilled enough to know how to prevent a neural connection? I can think of only one other person, Meara. And we don’t know what other cyborg defense strategies might be in place if it turns out to really be Creator Omega.”

  Meara nodded, chewed her lip, and thought. She and Aja swung at the sound of soft footfalls behind them. Will walked almost silently as he moved in their direction.

  He was dressed completely in black. Meara decided it was a good look for his leanly muscled body.

  Will wasted no time in answering the question for all of them. “Aja should return for help. If we need to take this place down, we’re going to require considerable cyborg power and weapons. I vote Meara and I continue to look for the women and make sure no one leaves with them.”

  Meara’s jaw tightened. “Did Eric tell ya where we were?”

  Will shook his head. “No. He gave me a lesson in long-range broadcast satellites. I had to find you for myself. He’s probably still making the case for deniable plausibility with Lucy, but the man was in deep shit when I left.”

  “Fecking smart-aleck arse kisser,” Meara said loudly, wincing when Aja smacked her arm. She turned to her violent friend and lowered her voice. “Eric said this place goes down at least three levels. Who knows what might be going on in there? Will is right. One of us needs to return for help. It makes sense to send ya back to fetch the others so we can take this fecking place apart.”

  “Couldn’t you signal for them to come?” Aja asked.

  Snorting, Will turned to Aja. “Peyton’s going to need briefing and to draw up a plan of attack. There’s no winging it with Marines. You’re an expert now on this location and you’ve had a whole day to observe how things work here.”

  “True,” Aja said. “I hate to leave Meara.”

  “She’ll be fine… and you’ll be back in a day with the help we need,” Will promised.

  Aja nodded as she raised a black-gloved finger and pointed it at Will’s nose. “If Meara comes to harm in my absence, I will kill you, William Talon.”

  Will rolled his eyes at the drama and turned to glare at Meara. “And you think I need mental help?”

  Meara laughed at his statement. “Yeah, but only because there’s still hope for the likes of ya, Will. Unfortunately, Aja’s always been this way and there is no hope. This is her true nature.”

  “No wonder the two of you are friends,” Will grumbled.

  Ignoring his sarcasm, Meara put her hands on Aja’s shoulders. “Be swift and return quickly,” she said.

  Aja nodded to Meara and flipped Will the bird before running off.

  Meara walked Will around the perimeter she and Aja had been constantly patrolling. “Notice anything unusual?”

  “Like the sudden quiet in my head when I went past the half-mile point?”

  Meara nodded. “They’re jamming our neural frequency with a cloud of white neural static that basically sounds like silence to our new processors.”

  “Any theories about why?”

  “Could be they’re installing neural processors in lots of cyborgs and have to constrain those getting them. Could be whoever is in that facility knows Kyra cracked the code when she got a good look at Bradley 360’s upgrades.”

  “That’s a lot of suppositions,” Will said.

  “Kyra and Nero both wrote in their notes that the processor Evil Brad was running was like nothing they had ever seen before. Kyra said it was definitely military grade based on the materials that were used. Titanium isn’t cheap, Will. My guess is that Creator Omega is working for the UCN. Those bastards are the only ones with the kind of money it would take to obtain such metals. The world’s supply is nearly exhausted and mining for them hasn’t been fruitful.”

  “I’m not as sure as you are about that. Maybe mining has been fruitful and that’s being kept a secret too. I know that’s what the old bots wer
e mining at the work camp where I was stashed,” Will said.

  “Titanium? But your file said the bots there were digging for gold.”

  Will nodded. “Gold would have made somebody rich enough to fix up that dump, but what they found instead were rich mineral deposits containing titanium. They also mined out some vanadium and molybdenum, which are alloys that blend with titanium. There was a good reason that work camp was the base for keeping an engineer like Seetha under wraps… and for my training.”

  “Do ya think someone was making new cyborgs like us with all that ore?” Meara asked.

  Shrugging, Will shared the only theory that made sense to him. “Creator Omega may have been toying with existing cyborgs like he did with Bradley 360, but he was also interested in the funding to make new ones. He used to tell me he couldn’t afford to wipe me completely and start over—like they did with King. That’s why he kept rebooting my processor and wiping the memory storage clean. Despite the fact it could have ruined my cybernetics, it was the only financial option available to him at the time.”

  “Bastards. And half-arse cyborgs like Bradley 360 might get muscles, but they’d never hold up against one of us in a fair fight.”

  Will nodded. “Correct. Human limbs, no matter how physically well-developed, will never be superior to cybernetic replacements.”

  “Is that why you got all four of your limbs replaced? Most soldiers kept at least some of their organics.”

  Will stared at the woman who walked beside him. “Did you also research what size underwear I wore?

  Meara laughed. “Go on now… ya well know I found out yer private information the old-fashioned way.”

  His black facemask, fortunately, hid the flush Will felt climbing his face. He’d been embarrassed around this woman since the day they’d met. “About what happened, Meara… what you did… I…”

  Shaking her head, Meara met his eyes with hers. It was all they could see of each other. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have teased ya like that, Will. That’s just my nature.”