Dark Hysteria: Cyborg Shifters #8

by Lucas, Naomi

  Raul grunted in response. “Earth needs no goodbyes.”

  Alexa agreed.

  “Come help me if you’re done.” He pointed to the third female locust. “She still needs her bush.”

  With one last glance at the male, who rolled its jaw as it finished the last of its food, Alexa grabbed the remaining female’s bush and dropped it into her drawer. Raul came to stand beside her. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “They’ll need to be fed once more before shift’s end. Then we’ll finally be able to take a load off.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You okay?”

  Her eyes shifted his way. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Captain wanted to talk to you alone. I didn’t want to leave you, wasn’t sure if you were in trouble. Sorry about that.”

  Alexa wiped her palms on her pants and turned toward the menagerie’s central computer panel where her workstation was. Raul followed her.

  “I wasn’t in trouble,” she said. “He wanted to formally introduce himself to me.”

  Raul sat down in his station and strapped in. “Odd.”

  “Why odd?” she asked, doing the same.

  “He never formally introduced himself to me.” Belt buckles clicked. “Whatever. Maybe it’s because you’re…”

  “I’m what?”

  “I was going to say a woman then thought better of it,” Raul said. “I have no problem with your sex, but who the hell knows what our captain thinks? I shouldn’t have assumed.”

  The lights flickered, lowered, indicating takeoff lockdown. Questor’s AI listed off safety measures, which were all redundant. When it was over, Alexa sighed and sagged into her seat. “It doesn’t matter what he thinks or what anyone else thinks. Let’s just do our jobs, okay?”

  “You’re not a talkative one.”

  “No. I’m not.”

  “Fine by me. Though I’ll crack you open someday, Ms. Dear. It’s not like we’ll have much else to do to occupy our time between missions. Crew becomes family, ya know? Maybe it doesn’t seem that way at the start, but you’ll see. The people you work with—survive with in space—when there’s no one else for billions of miles to rely on, they become your family real fast. Some of the best people I’ve met were on previous jobs.”

  Family? Right, she thought dryly. She had family once, but it was taken away from her. The lights lowered further, and a whizzing sound filled the space. The locusts were curled up in balls, probably responding to the thrusters. There were anxiety supplements added to their bushels she and Raul fed them. She hoped it was enough.

  Daniels’s voice came over the intercom again counting down from five. Alexa closed her eyes and counted down with him in her head.

  Earth needs no goodbyes.

  She’d been on it a little less than a month, and had no plans of ever returning.

  In fact, she was certain she wouldn’t. It was more likely she would be dead after all was said and done. Killing Hysterian—if she managed it—would be tricky to walk away from. There’d be an investigation, and she wasn’t an idiot. Cyborgs recorded everything they saw, keeping it within their databases.

  No, if Hysterian didn’t kill her first, and she managed to do the deed, it would take more than a miracle to survive what came after. She knew what she signed up for.

  The ship shuddered; internal gravity shifted. She clutched the armrests.

  There was no turning back now.

  Three

  Two days back in space, and he was already pent-up. Hysterian clasped his hands behind his neck and stretched, cracking the metal joints in his back and neck.

  In that time, he’d firmly established himself as captain, gaining the respect of the two men he worked the closest with—Daniels Waller, ex-miner freight co-pilot, a man who had years of experience maneuvering large, obnoxious behemoth ships through space, and had a keen desire to prove his manliness, and Horace [Redacted], his navigator and stand-in for when Hysterian wasn’t around to deal with the locals they would eventually encounter. Horace had been to more places throughout the universe than even Hysterian had. The direct knowledge that his navigational specialist had was something he grossly lacked.

  He’d picked them for a reason. Neither Daniels nor Horace liked interacting with people. Besides the occasional joke, they kept it business between them. It didn’t mean they were always serious; he’d overheard them conversing with a beer after the end of the second shift in Questor’s lounge. They laughed, talked about him, the job.

  There was always someone talking about him. Hysterian was used to it.

  Captain. Fucking captain of a ship.

  Hysterian dropped his hands and stood. How had he ended up back here after a half century of avoiding such a fate? He left the bridge without a backward glance and went straight for his quarters.

  He hadn’t captained a ship since the war, and even then, it had only been for a short time.

  Hysterian wasn’t built for it. He hadn’t had the material programmed in his systems when he was created. He’d been built for something else.

  The night shift ended two hours ago. He waited that long to leave the bridge; he didn’t want to run into the others as he wandered. By now, his crew should all be in their quarters and asleep. Just in case, he seeded into Questor’s security cameras and pinpointed everyone’s whereabouts.

  Pigeon, Raul, and Horace were in their quarters. Daniels was in the lounge.

  Alexa was in the laboratory.

  If she wanted to work late, that was her prerogative. Perhaps she was studying. He didn’t give a damn as long as she did her job and stayed away from him. That went for the rest of the crew as well.

  The captain’s quarters were located near the bridge so he didn’t have to walk far. His was the only quarters that weren’t shared. Horace, Daniels, and Pigeon shared a room down the corridor while Alexa and Raul had specialized quarters attached to the menagerie, which was on the level below him.

  They had no reason to come up here, and he had no reason to go down there—unless it was for a job. He would’ve preferred to have the rest of the crew roomed below as well, but the ship wasn’t laid out that way, and so he’d have to make do. Everyone slept near where they worked to optimize efficiency.

  A crew of five… He hadn’t thought five people would be a crowd, having been around crowds for the past fifteen years, but in a space as enclosed as the Questor, it was beginning to feel that way.

  Hysterian strode into his room. When the door closed, the tension in his muscles eased.

  Reaching up, he pulled down the top of his suit and opened his mouth, relieved to have fresh, cool air again. Rolling his jaw loose, he tugged off his gloves and set them down. He unbuckled his belt, rolled it up, and placed it on his bed beside his gloves, making quick work of his suit next. He stepped out of his nano-sewn clothes, checked them over for moisture, then stuffed them in his laundry receptacle, where they would be sanitized.

  When naked, his restraint eased.

  He pressed the pads of his fingers together, then ran his fingers through his hair. Hysterian eyed the blanket on his bed.

  He craved warmth more than anything. More than immortality, strength, power. He craved it so badly he’d spent the majority of his manmade life chasing after it. But it wasn’t the warmth of a blanket, clothes, or an environment that he wanted. He had tried all that. No, he craved the warmth of contact. Living, breathing, human contact.

  He was fucking desperate for it.

  Hysterian glanced at his bunched-up gloves with disgust.

  How long has it been since I touched someone, something with my bare hands? How long had it been since he’d touched someone who wanted it? A year ago, Zeph had torn Hysterian’s suit in a fight, swiping the skin off his face. The touch had been violent, but the kiss Hysterian gave Zeph hadn’t been.

  Hysterian laughed. My last warm touch was with a cold-blooded bastard. A brother. It was almost funny, in a sad, pathetic way.
At the time, a kiss was the only way Hysterian could subdue the other Cyborg without killing him.

  He rubbed the back of his hand across his lips. Still, that fleeting touch had been warm, even more so with blood gushing from the wounds he sustained from the other Cyborg. He felt guilty for nearly killing Zeph, but there were innocents needing protection, and Nightheart promised Hysterian the thing he’d wanted most by playing mercenary for him.

  Which was why Hysterian was here now, working for Nightheart and the EPED, and no longer selling his services to the richest crime lord on Elyria. Raphael hadn’t been thrilled to lose him, but there was nothing his ex-boss could do to make him stay and Raphael knew it.

  There was nothing Hysterian cared about enough for Raphael to use against him.

  And they had come together more as friends and less as boss and subordinate. Hysterian often refused to do Raphael’s bidding, and Raphael dealt with it because he enjoyed the bragging rights of having a Cyborg bodyguard.

  If it weren’t for Zeph and his misadventure in Hysterian’s neck of the universe, then Hysterian wouldn’t be here now, feeling a modicum of hope.

  Nightheart promised me warmth, contact.

  He promised a cure. He has money.

  More money than anyone else as far as Hysterian suspected.

  Raphael promised the same thing when Hysterian first entered into Raphael’s employment, and he delivered, but not in the way Hysterian needed.

  His ex-boss used his connections to look into a drug or a cure, but when all avenues failed, the inquiries stopped, and the encounters with random humans picked up instead. It’d been the only way for Raphael to pay him…

  Raphael delivered to Hysterian victims, drug addicts who were just as desperate for a fix as he was. His ex-boss gave him the warmth he craved in small fucked-up doses. For a while, Hysterian took them willingly, killing and doping up whoever Raphael wanted him to.

  Hysterian crouched, pressed his head between his knees, and wrapped his arms around his body.

  Glazed eyes, raspy coughs, pale spotted skin flickered through his mind. Stringy hair, urine-stained clothes, bulging purple blood vessels. Hundreds of faces flashed behind his eyes. Ghosts. Demons. They were always there.

  Did they matter? Back then, he would have said no. If these people ended up in his space, they got there because they were stupid. Anyone who came to Raphael for help was an idiot… Killing was second nature to a Cyborg made for war, but cold-blooded killing was something else entirely…

  Everything had slowly changed. It was like a genetic code rewrote itself within him. What made him so good as to be dubbed the name Tormentor no longer computed.

  Hysterian had started to care.

  When? He had no idea. It no longer mattered because any warmth he’d stolen from these idiot humans diminished, and he was jonesing for a new fix. He couldn’t turn to tranqs or hallucinogens because of his mecha nature and the nanocells that were like a disease throughout his whole body. They’d nullify the effects as soon as they entered his body. He’d need a great deal of alcohol to get any effect from it.

  Hysterian hated and envied the druggies he had spent so much time with.

  The pulsing bass of the music at Dimes rang in his ears. Hysterian hissed through his teeth.

  He remembered everyone he touched. He wouldn’t allow himself to forget. Wiping his mind clean of the memories would be cowardly. His jaw locked. He was far from a coward.

  But then Zeph ended up at Dimes, and Nightheart made contact with Hysterian to take him out. Was it fate? Probably not. Fate didn’t factor into Cyborg coding.

  Nightheart made him an offer Hysterian couldn’t refuse.

  “I’ll find a way to cure you, to stop your body’s reaction to contact, but in return, you’ll work for me. You’ll contract as a new retriever for the EPED. You’ll stop working for that fat fuck and get some fucking dignity back.”

  Hysterian had laughed at the time.

  Raphael hated being called fat.

  Unlike most Cyborgs who saw humans as inferior—especially human males—Hysterian saw them as useful. Their randomness and lack of calculation made them fun. Their ability to touch and hold everything—to feel everything—made him envious. And they were warm. Always warm.

  He had always been this way, but it wasn’t until the war ended that it became an issue.

  Perhaps being an interrogator and executioner for the military had something to do with it. They spliced his human DNA with an unusual creature for that very purpose.

  The cybernetic doctors spliced him and then didn’t give him the ability to shift.

  Raul had the right of it.

  Hysterian was defective.

  He rose to his feet and stretched. Though he couldn’t fully shift, he hadn’t lost all parts of his other half. The cybernetic doctors had given him some quirks that they thought could be useful.

  Thank the devil they gave me my tongue. Hysterian rolled his eyes.

  Self-pitying piece of shit. He strode to his lavatory and turned on his bathing unit. He may not have had an animal he could unleash when pent-up, but at least he could seek relief in other ways.

  Microscopic pores opened up all over his skin, undetectable to the human eye, and his body slickened with oil. Toxins. Boiling water sprayed down upon him from overhead, hiding his secretion. The clear substance his body produced vanished with the water. He rested his arms on the wall and bowed his head. Hysterian stared at the water pooling at his feet being sucked into the drain. In another minute, the lavatory would be filled with steam, blinding him.

  The ship’s recycling systems would never encounter his secretion either. By the time they made it to the ship’s normal water unit, the nanocells within his toxins would have destroyed it. He made sure of it when his ship was being redesigned. The water gathered in a separate tank to be scanned, and only released back into the ship’s normal systems when it was deemed pure.

  His crew would never know their captain poisoned the water supply nightly…

  Hysterian slid his right arm off the wall and grabbed his cock. It hardened in his hand.

  Thank the fucking devils who created me for giving me a dick. Hysterian squeezed his shaft as hard as he could without crushing it. Pain zipped through him for an instant. He kept squeezing, praying for the release he really needed.

  Boiling water would never be enough.

  His hand would never be enough.

  The phantom of a willing woman, one open to his desperate affection, took shape in his mind. A lithe creature he fantasized about every waking second of every day. A female who was immune to him. Not only immune, but one who also wanted him despite his past.

  His hand slid up and down his length.

  He’d never had a woman before. There wasn’t anyone alive who could survive long enough for him to take. Trentian women could, if he was willing to seek one out. But they were exceedingly rare due to the biowarfare his kind released, all but wiping their fertility out to the point that Trentian numbers sharply declined over the past several generations.

  It’d been a terrible measure humans took to make sure the aliens would never rise up in the future and restart the war. They couldn’t if their numbers were low.

  The Trentian females who remained lived on their home planet, protected by their God Xanteaus and his chosen Knights. A place no human was allowed to go near, especially a Cyborg.

  Hysterian hadn’t encountered a purebred alien woman in over forty years, and when he had, his codes urged him to kill her.

  Hysterian squeezed the tip of his shaft and rolled his palm.

  The woman survived, of course. His urgings weren’t like some of his brethren, who couldn’t resist. Not to mention she’d been very old back then, having lived for over a century. An elder, a diplomat for her people, she had still been very beautiful. His lips twisted, remembering her. He hadn’t wanted to fuck something warm so desperately back then either…

  He pictured the alien fema
le’s face and thrust his dick into his hand.

  A Trentian female was out of the question. Even if he sought one out—actually procured one—she’d be terrified of him, more so than any human female ever would be. Cyborgs had killed their kind by the thousands after all…

  And what would stop him from killing her anyway on accident? Battling one’s own nature was hard, and would be much harder if he was fucking. Fucking the way he wanted to fuck.

  Hysterian groaned and leaned his brow against the stall wall.

  No, he needed a damned cure.

  A devil-damned blocker.

  The water began to cool, and his thrusting increased. His need ramped as the shadowy female in his head arched her back, stuck out her ass, and screamed for him.

  Scream for me.

  He was going to burst.

  He gritted his teeth. His tongue shot out to lick the wall.

  Hysterian reached down with his free hand and thrust into both of them at the same time.

  Phantom lips pursed, a head flung back, and he fell to his knees gripping his cock. He released all over the wall, exhaling hard. The water turned frigid as he stared at his cum where it trickled. Thick yet slick, it didn’t take long for his seed to mix with the water below and vanish into the vents.

  He reached up and turned the bathing unit off. He’d released enough of his toxins to breathe easier—for a time. With a modicum of ease, Hysterian rose and stepped out, letting the lavatory’s drying system suck out the humidity. Less than a minute later, he was dry except for his hair. It had fallen forward and tangled around his face.

  He stared into the mirror, his eyes were bright teal but dimming. He watched through the white strands of his hair.

  Picking up a comb, he brushed his hair back until it was straight and precise.

  His appearance was something he could control. The day he stopped caring about it was a day everyone should fear.

  He might not be able to shift, and he may not be as big or as vicious as other Cyborgs, but he was still a force of nature. With just a touch, he was deadlier than most.

  Hysterian dressed and placed his gun back into his utility belt. He glanced at his empty bed once before heading for the door.