by Maya Carnage
The Cyborg's Rebel
by
Maya Carnage
Dedication
To my amazing support team, without you, this book wouldn't have come to fruition. Thank you.
Acknowledgements
Sometimes writing isn't easy, but the process is made smoother by those who are always looking for ways to cheer me up! Y'all are amazing!
As always, I would like to thank and acknowledge my readers. You wonderful people make this possible, and fun. I'm very appreciative of you and love hearing from y'all!
If you would like to contact me, my email is [email protected]
If you want information on my books, future releases, and other interesting things, you can find me on my blog at https://mayacarnage.wixsite.com/author
Thank you for picking up The Cyborg's Rebel, I hope you enjoy!
Disclaimer
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coicidental.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review. COPYRIGHT by Maya Carnage
Cover Art by: Kasmit Covers/ www.kasmitcovers.com
Chapter One
Dawn
The cuffs click, securing Dawn's wrists tightly together. The sharp sound echoes in the small holding cell. Taking a deep breath in, she looks around at the faces of the officers surrounding her, remembering them for future reference. When the cuffs are tight enough for them, they attach the chain lying around her feet to them. The chain connects the cuffs around her ankles to the ones around her wrists. It's going to make walking down the corridor to the loading area harder than it needs to be. Dawn is where she wants to be. For the last five years, this has been all she could think about. Five years of hard work and constant strategizing. Kayla and the other rebel leaders have put it all on her shoulders. It is now her responsibility to make sure the twelve surviving members of the 8th ward rebels get broken out of The Gregory.
Hopefully, it won't be that hard.
The officers shuffle back and forth. Dawn can tell that they feel nervous about what they are about to do. They probably think that she is going to give them a hard time, but they couldn't be more wrong. She knows that she must put up some type of struggle if she wants to look convincing. No one wants to go to Gregory's. But she isn't going to be the pain in the ass she has been the last few weeks. There's no need. She is getting what she wants.
Two of the officers take her by the arms. A third swipes his keycard, punches in his pin, opening the door. With a firmer grasp on her arms, the officers lead her out into the dimly lit corridor.
The corridor is painted grey. There are spots here and there where the paint chipped away from aging. Five of the nine lights are blown, casting the hallway in shadow. The one light above the door leading into the loading area blinks off and on.
When she looks at that flickering light, Dawn can't but help feel it is a sign. Like it is saying this is the way you need to go.
Two of the officers push through the door, the two still holding her shove her toward the door. The last two guards follow quickly behind.
The loading area is a large enough space to land a medium sized vessel. Like the one that will be taking her to the ship escorting her to The Gregory.
They force her ahead. She digs her feet into the ground, halting her forward momentum. When the officers try to tug her along behind them, she throws her full weight against one of the officers still holding her arm. She knocks into him and they both crash to the floor. Dawn scrambles up onto her knees and awkwardly gets to her feet. She doesn't make it far before an officer tackles her to the ground. When he tugs her to her feet, she sinks her teeth his arms. He howls with pain, backhanding her across the face. She glares at him from beneath her dirty blonde hair. He mutters something under his breath. "If you're going to say something, don't be a fucking coward about it. Say it loud enough for me to hear."
He swallows but doesn't respond. Dawn laughs, scoffing. "Pathetic."
Another officer comes up from behind her, grabbing her arm and shoving her toward the ship. She glances behind at the remaining officers. "You're all going to miss me."
She is propelled up the ramp and into the ship. She is taken into the back. They take her to the back of the ship where a large room has several small cells in it. After they lock her in and remove the cuffs, she slumps down against the wall. She is this close to rescuing her father. Dawn can't let anything get in her way, not when her father's life is at risk.
Five years ago, the eighth ward rebels attacked a small army base on the outskirts of Houston. There was only supposed to be a handful of soldiers and a group of workers waiting to get driven to the fields. Dawn's father, James, and his group had been preparing for the mission for months. It was easy compared to some of the missions the rebellion sent him on. When he and the other eighteen rebels converged on the base, they were surprised by a visiting militia group. The eighth ward didn't stand a chance. The nineteen rebels were taken to The Gregory, where they were sentenced to death. In a month's time, her father and the others will be put to death. Dawn and her sister, Kayla, wanted to save them in the beginning, but it was too risky. The rebel's leader said to not risk discovery it would be best to wait.
It wasn't easy for Dawn to do that. She has never been a patient person. With her father stuck in the hellhole called The Gregory, she was even less so. Kayla was the only thing that kept her still and prevented her from rushing off and trying to rescue their dad. She wouldn't have succeeded, but she would have tried anyhow. Kayla convinced her that the best chance for their father's survival would be to wait. That's what they did. For the last five years, Kayla and Dawn have worked tirelessly in creating the perfect rescue mission. They made sure that the plan they went with would be the best chance for all their men.
Kayla was the one who was supposed to get taken as a prisoner, but seven weeks ago she left in a hurry. She said that she needed to take care of something and made Dawn takeover in her place. No one has heard from her since. Dawn was beginning to worry. It wasn't like her sister not to contact her. But right now, she needs to keep her mind focused on the mission. Save the imprisoned rebels.
The plan is for Dawn to get placed in the section closest to the men's facility. That way she will be able to make contact easily with one of the rebels. From there she is to have everything in place by the end of the month, that is when the rescue team is coming to break them out. She has to survive in one of the roughest prisons for two weeks.
She can do that.
Dawn shifts where she sits against the wall. Her legs begin to get stiff from having sat for a long time. After the officers left her in the cell, the ship didn't immediately take off like she assumed it would. She slid down the wall when she grew tired of standing. She crossed her legs and shut her eyes, leaning back, and what felt like hours later, when it was only forty minutes or so, the floor beneath her butt rumbled to life. She began counting the seconds until she would be boarding the vessel transporting her to The Gregory.
It takes three and a half hours to reach their destination.
The ship comes to a halt. The sudden stopping causes Dawn to be thrown forward, smashing into the wall across from her. "Son of a bitch!" She rubs at the bump beginning to swell on her forehead. She looks at the wall with a sneer. Coming to her feet, which is easier to do without the cuffs encircling her wrists and ankles, she strides over to the door and stares out the small window. No one is in the hall outside her cell.
That's odd. She figured someone would be stationed outside the door to keep an eye on her. What if she tried to break out or harm herself, they would be too late to stop her. Dawn presses closer to the window, trying to look further down the hall. Not seeing anyone coming to get her, she walks away from the window, back over to her spot against the wall. She sits back down. Waiting.
Dawn hasn't had a long time to prepare for this role, but the whole time her and her sister were setting the mission up, she knew what had to be done. She assumed that it would be her sister out here, and she would have been on board the rescue ship. Now that she is in this position, she realized that certain things need to change. She isn't Kayla. Her way of doing things wouldn't work for Dawn. When she realized this, she neglected to tell Kayla or any of the other rebels. She knew that they wouldn't agree with her new plan. It isn't that much different from the original. Dawn only changed a few things to fit her better. For one, she isn't going to leave it up to one of the other rebels to be the contact point for the rescue team. She's risking her life being in that prison. She'll be damned if she will let others work around her while she does nothing to secure her and her father's safety. She knows that her sister has a contact in prison. Dawns thinks that it is one of the guards. If she can find him, she can try to get a message to her sister, if she is back by then, if not maybe her contact will have another way of contacting her that Dawn doesn't know about. Dawn's new part of the plan is having a backup team in case something goes wrong with the first one. The rebel's leader was against the idea when Kayla brought it up over four years ago. He was adamant that only one team be sent in to retrieve the eighth ward rebels. No one has tried to bring it up to him since. Dawn decided not to let him know that she is going to do it anyhow.
A door bangs shut, and then the sound of footsteps can be heard heading toward her cell. Dawn sits up straight. After the sound of an officer swiping their card and punching in their pin, the door is yanked open. The officer gestured for her to stand up. Dawn gets to her feet and sticks her hands. The officer links the cuffs around her wrists, but this time the matching pair isn't put on her ankles. She walks easily next to the guard as they make their way out of the corridor holding the cells.
"This isn't going to take long, is it? It's really fucking boring back there in those cells." The officer ignores her.
Well, fuck him. Dawn turns her head from side to side. If she is ever brought back here, she wants to remember the layout in case she needs to escape.
The officer takes her back the way she came in. The rest of the officers gather around the door leading outside, and when the one walking beside her moves to take her outside, the others surround her. Not giving her any chance to run off once she makes it out there. She shuffles down the steep ramp, being careful to move too fast in case she loses her balance. It would fucking suck if she fell head first down the ramp in front of all these people. She would never live it down. Her feet hit the ground. The officers bring her to a stop, waiting for something or someone. Dawn takes the chance to look around.
They've landed on another loading dock. She doesn't know where this one is, nothing looks familiar or like anything she's ever heard of. It's larger than the one they left. The loading dock is big enough for a large vessel to land in it. Which makes Dawn think that she isn't being escorted by some simple officers. If so, they would have taken her to one of the transport areas, where most ships dock to deliver goods or pick up people heading for another destination. That's where most low-level prisoners are taken. A small ship and some officers or marshal will escort them to the correctional facility.
Dawn's brow becomes creased.
If she isn't being taken by officers to The Gregory, who is in charge of escorting her? She can't think of anyone else who would be assigned to do so. It's the type of work low ranking officials are charged with doing. But if she is here, it can't be an officer or marshal taking her.
Dawn is jarred out of her head by the jerking of her arm. One of the ships that were already docked when they came in has opened their door an extended the ramp. The officers lead her over to the vessel.
Chapter Two
Axe
Axe scrubs at his face, washing away the soot that clung to him while he was down below working on the boiler. It has been messing up for days now, but no one has been able to come out and look at it. It isn't in Axe's job description to fix broken parts on the ship, but he had nothing else to do. Not while he waits for the prisoner to arrive at Hach's transport bay 1567. He landed here yesterday evening. He woke up early this morning to fix the boiler. The next available time slot for an engineer to come out and look at the damned thing isn't until late next week. Axe and his crew didn't feel like waiting that long to have steady hot water. It wasn't a hard job for him, the scientists who made him one-hundred- and-thirty-five years ago made sure of that.
Axe, along with hundreds of other cyborgs, was created at the start of the war against earth. Each of them was crucial to the defeat of earth. It probably wouldn't have happened if the Malviks didn't have them fighting their war.
The Malviks is a species from another planet over a hundred lightyears away from earth. Their planet was destroyed by planet mining, and they were forced to flee their dying world. Earth was the easiest target. It would not have taken a lot to overpower them and claim the planet as theirs. The Malvik's best scientists started the project of making cyborgs. It took them ten years to create the strongest and smartest monsters to decimate their enemies. Earth never stood a chance against the Malviks.
Axe was made for war and the last fifty years of no action has made him into a quarrelsome man. He has pined for the days when he would be called back to fight, but with earth's rebels growing smaller every year, that is very unlikely. So, Axe has settled himself into the role of sergeant on the 54th regent of The Pursuer. It is a menial task. It has been slowly driving the cyborg insane.
When his commanding officer, Rodrick, messaged him across the forum where all the cyborgs communicate with each other, Axe opened the message. He hoped that it was some kind of interesting work that it would get him away from The Pursuer.
Rodrick needed him to deliver a high-risk prisoner to The Gregory. It wasn't what he was looking for, but it was something different. He said he'll accept the assignment. Rodrick sent over the prisoner's file, and Axe spent the night reading over the information.
The prisoner is Dawn Perkins, a member of the elite group of rebels. Meaning her family has been in it since the beginning. Hate must run thickly through her veins for Axe's kind. It always does. She has been involved in several crimes the rebels have committed in the last ten years, one of which lead to the death of a government official. The council of Malviks has ordered she be sentenced to life on The Gregory. They also asked that a cyborg be the one to escort her aboard the ship, making sure she is securely locked away.
There wasn't much information on her, only what crimes she has been involved in. It didn't say her age or her familial connections to the rebels.
Axe pats at his face wiping away the water droplets. He pauses, looking at his reflection in the mirror. His face has always been described as striking. With high cheekbones, thick black hair, and bright blue eyes, most women can't resist him. Axe has never admired his looks. It wasn't coded into him to be vain. He turns from the mirror and walks out of the bathroom. He makes his way to the entrance bay. When he reaches the door, it is already wide open. Several officers are huddle around a person and shouting at her to stop. He shoulders two of them out of his way to get a better sight.
In the middle of the circle is a tall woman with ample curves. She is kicking and biting at one of the officers. He has a pair of cuffs in his hands, but she won't let him put them on her. "What's going on here?" Axe ordered.
The officer next to him stuttered his reply. "S-she won't l-let Officer Logan cuff h-her, sir."
He stares at him before turning toward Dawn Perkins. He strides over to her and kn
ocks her to the ground, pinning her beneath him. She struggles under him but doesn't get loose. Glaring up at him, she spits in his face. "You're a fucking bastard," she growled.
He wipes his face off and tells the officers to leave his ship that he has it from here. He looks down at the prisoner. She is more attractive than he thought she would have been. Her eyes are brown with specks of gold coursing through them. Even with her face pinched with irritation, she manages to make Axe grow hard. Her blond hair lay tangled around her head. He knows that if she were to wash it, it would be several shades lighter than what it is now.
"I'm going to let you up, but if you try to strike me, I'll have you locked in a full body vest. It's not pleasant, believe me."
"I'm not going to hit you," she answered.
He hesitates not believing her completely. Deciding to give her a chance, he lifts himself off of her and helps her to her feet. He takes a master key out of one of the many pockets lining his pants and unlocks the cuffs around her wrists. She looks at him suspiciously.
She should. He isn't here to be her friend. His job is to make sure she is delivered to The Gregory and that she is locked away for the rest of her life. The only reason he unlocked the cuffs was that they were pointless. There's no difference between her being tied up or loose. She is not capable of overpowering or winning a fight against Axe.
She rubs her sore wrists. He places his hand on her back and guides her toward the hall that leads to the cells. She follows obediently. Her scent travels up to Axe. He takes in a deep breath of the sweet smelling perfume coming from his prisoner. He glances at her from the side of his eye. She stares ahead with her mouth pressed stubbornly closed. She refuses to look at Axe. He laughs to himself. Dawn isn't going to be an easy prisoner. For now, she seems to be going along with his orders, but Axe can tell that she is only biding her time. She'll eventually strike, and he can't wait until she does.
