“Alright. Here’s the short version. Someone’s been doing all kinds of outlawed gene manipulation on humans and animals alike. One of the things I saw back there was a human man’s torso grafted onto a horse’s body. It was like someone was designing a real-life version of one of those mythical centaur creatures. And that one was alive until very recently.”
When the elevator doors slid open, Meara ducked inside the tiny lift. She avoided Will’s shocked gaze. She’d never get through her explanation if she started feeling sorry for his shock.
“There were other experiments too. I was heading back after seeing them, but since ya hadn’t yet yelled for me, I decided to get a better look at the centaur one since the cage was open. I saw a cybernetic compartment on the man’s head and a med port on the hip of the horse part. No decomposition had taken place yet and rigor mortis hadn’t set in. I moved the horse part with my foot and it wasn’t even stiff. I suspected all the organics were still being kept recoverable by the cybernetics installed in the man part. The creature had been euthanized because there was a giant hypodermic transfer next to the horse part. It was empty and looked to have been discarded in a hurry.”
“The AIs said they’d been terminated. Section B subjects weren’t in need of transport.”
“Ya got it,” Meara said coldly. “Fecking bastards created them then put them down. I hope those scientist bastards all die horribly.”
Will groaned with an anger that had nowhere to go. “What the hell are those crazy bastards thinking? It’s like they started giving out mad scientist awards after the war ended. The atrocities seem never-ending and just keep getting worse.”
“In a way, they did give out awards,” Meara stated flatly as the lift began ascending. “I’m sure somebody got paid well when all those properly-behaving soldiers were put into the Cyber Husband and Cyber Wife Programs. Kyra made money on it herself and admits to doing so, but from what Eric tells me, every cent she made went into discreetly researching how to reverse cybernetic enhancements because the UCN and Norton forbade her to do it.”
Will nodded. He’d known that, hadn’t he? Saints and sinners came in all forms.
“Kyra said she never found out where her fecking jackhole scientist husband spent all the millions he received for the work he did. Kyra used the modest inheritance she got from Jackson Channing’s death to help her buy Peyton. How many of her is it going to take to nullify the other crazy scientists out there? I know that’s what she thinks about every day. Peyton guards her life fiercely for a reason—Nero as well. Next to her, he’s the smartest about restoration. With them, most cyborgs wouldn’t have a fecking chance of being restored to normal.”
Will frowned. He hadn’t thought about the big picture in quite that way. The passage of time was kept from him until he’d been rescued from the work camp when they picked up Seetha. He was still catching up from the decade he had lost without any memory of its passing. He still had trouble thinking of his country and its people turning against those who’d saved it, so he usually didn’t indulge those thoughts.
Kyra and Peyton’s restoration work being fought by Norton and downplayed by the UCN was daily proof that no one in any position of power cared about any cyborg’s life. The UCN had only offered up cyber soldier back pay when Kyra Winters politically blackmailed them into it.
The bottom line was that without Kyra’s honest change of heart, all cyborgs would be in cybernetic code cages, if not real ones.
And he’d still be a rotting death machine at the mercy of a madman.
Yes, he’d come to terms with the truth of that, which was why he helped Peyton and Kyra, no matter how much he wanted to crawl into a hole and disappear forever.
Now he looked at Meara and thought of their short but satisfying make-out session in the carrier. She’d said kissing made her forget they had a job to do and people to save. He reminded himself that kissing Meara was evidence of the kind of new reality he could have. Now the rest of him just had to get on board and stop expecting the worst from every situation.
That was going to be more difficult after the horrors Meara had discovered, but he was going to try. He wanted more of the chatty, irreverent woman. He wanted to know if there was a new life waiting for him in her arms.
The doors slid open and they headed out across the floor. Suddenly they were stepping around puddles of mechanical fluid on their trek to a giant hole in the walls that hadn’t been there before.
“Hydraulic liquids?” Will suggested, sniffing the air. “It’s definitely hydraulics, but I smell something else—something like human sweat. Maybe I’m still thinking about the dead we left behind. That scent is hard to forget.”
“Will, what the feck are those things? Are ya seeing what I’m seeing?” Meara asked in shock.
His gaze went beyond the fenced in area to the trees where he saw a couple cyborgs firing weapons at what looked like a small, strangely upright tank. He had no fucking idea what the rolling tank weapons were but they fired back at cyborgs he assumed were Peyton’s men like some sort of mobilized military responding to a fight.
“It really is like the war never ended,” Will said, pointing to a route around the worst of the fight.
“The war hasn’t ended for cyborgs. I thought ya knew that,” Meara chastised.
She ducked as low as she could with her load and ran swiftly. She had no time to see if Will was keeping up, but at least he wasn’t worrying her with his caution. Seetha was going to need to check the man’s calibration. His running speed wasn’t up to par, nor was his strength when all he was carrying was one emaciated human male. It was like Will’s cyborg side was… well, throttled down, Meara decided.
She had cleared the fighting people and was well on her way to the carrier when one of the machines they’d seen at a distance suddenly rolled in front of her to block her path. She straightened and looked up into the eyes of an unknown man—or at least it had once been a man. He stared down at her and seemed to be thinking about what action to take. Was he running programs or independently operating on some wireless frequency she and Will couldn’t access?
His poor body looked like it had been carefully and painfully wired into the weapon itself. All those metal tubes and wires running from him into the mechanics of the machine was a gruesome sight. For what purpose would they do that to a man? She had no idea.
But she well understood the purpose of the dual laser blasters strapped to his mechanical arms. They were now aimed at her and prepping for a blast.
“Feck me,” Meara said, turning to run. But she never got the chance.
The tank imploded internally beneath the man, though it didn’t fall apart. Instead, the man-tank thing just stopped dead where it was. Unfortunately, she and the two humans she was carrying went flying from the force of the internal explosion, even though nothing metal flew off the container or the rolling tracks.
Meara rolled and scrambled to her feet immediately after she landed on the ground. She first ran to check on those she’d been trying to get safely away. The woman was still hanging on. The man was not. His chances hadn’t been good anyway, but feck, they’d been so close to getting away.
She stood and glared at what was left of the machine. The body of the man now hung limply in the contraption with no awareness anymore in his mechanized gaze. Meara approached the thing cautiously until she saw Rio Sanchez’s body over by a tree. She dashed over and checked for a pulse. It was there… thank the Goddess. The man seemed determined to live no matter what happened to him. It was a testimony to the power of love, though she doubted Will would ever feel the same about it.
Then she saw him… lying on the ground behind the tracks of the machine. In the back of it was a giant black hole that looked like it had been burnt into it.
“Will!” Meara screamed as she ran to him. She reached out to touch his face with her bare hand and was knocked backward by a strong jolt of residual electricity. “Feck me. That hurts like hell, ya motherfucker.
I’m trying to help ya.”
She took her boot and forcefully rolled Will to his back, glaring down at him. “First chance we get, I’m hauling your arse to Seetha for some long overdue calibration. Don’t ya be dying on me, Captain Serious. What have ya gone and done to yerself?”
“Will saved you,” Peyton said, limping over and looking down at Will. He pushed at him with his boot and Will groaned. Peyton’s grin was slow in coming, but he’d take a groan over complete silence. All sound meant life was still there. “My pulse cannon was done. I couldn’t take the thing out when I saw it go after you.”
“And yer saying Will took it out?”
“Yes. If it’s like last time, the left-over electricity will drain off in a bit and we can then safely start bringing his organics around.”
“But he could be dying for all we know. I can’t touch him without getting shocked,” Meara complained.
“Let’s choose to believe Will’s body is programmed to recover. He took out the last of these things. He was probably the only one who could, because we exhausted all the weapons we brought on the rest,” Peyton ordered.
The large med carrier landed in a clear area beside them. King and Eric both poured out of it in a run. “Fuck,” they said in unison as they stared at the now dead contraption.
“Man-tanks? Fuck that. It’s like a war nightmare coming to life. I used to dream of things just like this,” King said.
Eric put a hand on Meara’s shoulder. “Did you find Aja?”
“No,” Meara said sadly, wrenching her attention away from the thing Will had destroyed. “But she’s not dead or I’d know that for certain. I also didn’t find that friend of Phoebe’s who has gone missing either. Phoebe is one of the converted college kids. She fought free of the hibernation and I learned from her what had happened to all of them. Only nine out of twenty survived.” Meara closed her eyes and shook her head. “What I did find in that place was even worse than these man-tank things, if ya can believe that.”
“We were ready to head in when they came rolling out. The bodies still have their ID chips installed so we should be able to identify them. I’ve got several guys collecting the data now.”
“Are we taking one of these back for Kyra?”
All eyes swung to Eric, who shrugged. “Seems this is something she needs to examine up close. If more of these man-tanks exist…” He shrugged again.
“Got room on the carrier for it?” Peyton asked with a smirk.
“Maybe. The cargo hold is empty. If we put it on its side, we should be able to haul it back that way. My only concern is about the added weight. We’re not running on full crystals.”
“That would be Will’s fault,” Meara admitted. “He crushed a couple crystals to keep the carrier from leaving. That was before we knew it was kids and that we had to get them away.”
“If the load’s too heavy, we’ll move some of the people back to the other airjet,” King said.
Their gazes all shifted to the ground as Will rolled sideways and moaned. Meara went to him and knelt without touching him. “Ya shock me again, William Talon, and there’ll be seven kinds of hell for ya to pay.”
“Shut up, Meara,” Will said tiredly, raising a hand to his aching head. “I was saving your life… I think. Fuck, it just happened. I tossed Sanchez down and just… reacted.”
Meara reached out a hand and tentatively touched him again, happy when she didn’t get shocked. “Do I need to develop a rubber fetish before we get to do the deed? Yar just full of kinky surprises, aren’t ya?”
“Rubber? What are you talking about?” Will asked gruffly. He forced his eyes open and glared up at her dancing ones. “Oh… right. Rubber would make it safe for us to… very funny, Meara. Fuck you and your warped sense of humor. Can’t you see I’m in pain here?”
Meara chuckled. “Well, ya didn’t damage Sanchez when ya tossed him, which shows yar a decent bloke, so I guess I can give ya a pass for shocking me. I lost one of my rescues in the fallout.”
“The guy didn’t make it?” Will asked.
“No,” Meara said softly. “But at least we tried to save him. Thanks for saving me and the other one I carried out. I was about to be blasted to bits when ya intervened. None of us would have made it if ya hadn’t done that.”
“You really suck at showing gratitude,” Will said miserably, and then hurriedly lifted his fingers to her lips when her eyes began to dance again. “Meara… don’t…”
He felt her lips move with her giggle under his fingertips. Meara’s crude humor at his expense was a tiny, precious moment in the middle of all the hell they’d just gone through. He tried imagining any other woman showing that much humor in midst of all that hell. Never, he admitted. Only Meara seemed capable of rising above shit enough to laugh.
“Our private joke only, okay?” he pleadingly whispered.
Laughing at Will’s embarrassment over teasing that hadn’t even left her lips, Meara moved his fingers away from her mouth and bent down to kiss him soundly.
“Don’t get used to me behaving, but I hear ya this time. And yar coming along just fine, William Talon. Ya didn’t melt down on me in the bowels of hell and ya saved my arse when it needed saving. Maybe ya weren’t so fast at doing it as Aja might have been, but ya’ll do as a partner in a pinch.”
“I’m going to spank you for saying shit like that,” Will grumbled.
“Promises, promises,” Meara chided, unwilling to let him get by with taming her.
Once again wondering if he was ever going to have the upper hand with Meara, Will snorted as King chuckled over their conversation and helped him stand up.
Seconds later, they all fell to the ground and covered their heads as the building imploded and created a giant crater. Moments later flames were steadily shooting into the air from smaller explosions underground. Soon there would be nothing left but ashes. All evidence of the horrors they had discovered would be gone.
Meara climbed to her feet and scowled. “Now we can’t check the bottom floor. We’ll never know what the bastard was really doing down there.”
Will groaned as King lifted his battered body upright. He felt like he had after a torture session with the man responsible for today. The bastard had ruined his life and was continuing to do make it as bad as possible. Unfortunately, he had no time to dwell on the past.
He had to set it all aside now to talk some sense into a pouting Meara who might do god-only-knew what in a temper. “As small as the second floor was, all these tank things and their charging stations would have taken up the entire bottom floor. We saw several cyber labs set up for conversions on the second floor. I think we learned a lot, considering we might have died checking out anything more. Be grateful we saved all those we could and made it out alive ourselves.”
Meara nodded. “I guess yar right. What are the chances of Creator Omega taking himself out in that blast? Can I get a maybe to that at least?”
But no one was willing to go there. The man’s ego would have made sure he had a path to safety before he destroyed the facility.
They all knew it.
Which meant they’d truly done nothing except save a few more of his victims.
And after all that Aja was still missing…
15
Nero passed his portable tracking monitor over to Vincent. It contained a subset of code. “Over there. Just outside those trees. We should find her in the next two miles. I’ll put down in the first opening I see,” he told the quiet man, who merely nodded.
Corporal Vincent Asgard needed a new voice box, but he refused to let Nero or Kyra install one. Nero had read the report—several times in fact. Nothing in it had indicated the mental issue stopping the man.
In his last instance of hand-to-hand combat during the war, Vincent’s throat had been ripped open by the jagged edge of an enemy’s fighting knife. The two men who had inflicted the original combat injury to him had finished their dirty work by methodically cutting his vocal chords. Then th
ey’d sewn him up to force his cybernetics to heal him so they could torture him in other inventive ways after that. Vincent’s account said they had been highly entertained by his silent screaming and his facial expressions of agony. Peyton and King saw to the end of the enemy combatants, but Vincent had refused all repairs.
Except for the artificial larynx device Vincent only used when speech was critical, not speaking at all was a liability the man had chosen to live with. Nero still had high hopes of talking the mostly restored cyborg into getting the repair. His new processor would support a complete vocal transplant easily. He and Kyra made sure Vincent worked with Rachel whenever the opportunity arose so the man would get to see the possibility of what could be done.
So far, their machinations had not been successful, but that was the thing about cyborgs. You never knew what they would do once their human sides took control again. He certainly could say that about the one he was heading to rescue from her own bad judgment.
How anyone got the drop on Aja Kapur was beyond him, but someone obviously had. And they’d left her in a forest for reasons he was afraid to contemplate. Lucy was convinced Aja still lived, and he had hung all his hopes on her assurance of that being true. It was the sole source of his bravery in coming out here.
Vincent was out of the vehicle the moment they landed, and as was typical, it took all of Nero’s energy to keep up with the cyborg, who’d now taken the lead in their search.
The beeping tracker lit up like the game he’d based it on and announced they had arrived at their target location. Nero looked around but saw nothing. It was just a small strip of land beside a grove of trees.
Vincent turned to him and shrugged.
“I know,” Nero replied. “I don’t understand it either. She should be right here.”
He held out his hand and Vincent handed over the tracker. Nero studied it and walked slowly forward. The tracker emitted a solid stream of sound.
William 874X_Book 5 of Cyborgs_Mankind Redefined Page 17
