“Well, it’s about time ya woke up, lazy arse. We’d likely be leaving this fecking place already if it wasn’t for ya sleeping yar life away.”
“Meara, when my muscles stop twitching I’m going to kick your taunting, slang throwing, Irish ass all the way back to your homeland. If the gods support my prayers, you’ll find people there who talk nonsense exactly like you do… and just as incessantly.”
Aja rolled her head against the cot and saw Meara casually sitting in a chair outside her cage. Meara was also calmly swiping what appeared to be a portable com, reading who knew what, but she was processing it as fast as her eyes could take in each screen.
“Irish? Why are you out there and yet I’m in here?”
Meara didn’t look up. “Because ya’re bitchy to everyone you come across and too hard-headed to listen. There’s a good reason I cultivate my charm, Aja. It gets me a lot farther. A little while ago, it got me a meal and a couple of decent beers. I’m quite contented now.”
Aja rolled her eyes before rolling her feet to the floor. The movement helped shake off the lingering spasms. That stunner really packed a punch. “How long was I out?”
Meara shrugged. “My time tracking is still sketchy as ever. Apparently that problem isn’t in my logic chip. But if ya aren’t wanting a precise number, last time I checked the com in my hand, ya had been prone for nearly five hours.”
“Five hours?” Aja slapped the door that wouldn’t budge now. Reaching around the bars she felt a giant metal lock holding it closed. “I see the bastard secured me good, didn’t he?”
“Absolutely. And if ya don’t want Nero to zap yar arse again, I’d advise you to keep a civil tongue around him. He’s rather old fashioned about respect. And the man doesn’t have a kind word to say about ya, if ya must know. While I was feasting, I overheard him explaining yar lockup to the others that are here.”
Aja rattled the cage again. “Why haven’t you done anything to remove this lock?”
Sighing, Meara set aside the portable com. “A body can’t get any reading done around ya. Ya’re always slamming, and banging, and screeching.”
Meara rose and walked to the desk, coming back with the key to the lock. She held it up until she saw a pair of angry chocolate eyes zero in on it.
“See this, Aja? I’ll use it to let ya out, but first ya have to swear on all six of Shiva’s arms that ya will act normal whether ya feel like it or not. Nero wasn’t lying to us. Captain Pennington’s in worse trouble than our connection to her indicated. I’m going through the code Nero downloaded from her damaged companion chip now and helping him look for what varies from what yars currently. We kind of borrowed a copy from ya when I told him ya were the only one of us who managed to break its fecking hold on yar brain. And no… I didn’t tell him about the other, but I think ya should.”
Aja snorted. “So let me out then if things are so dire. We’ll see what needs to be done.”
“No. Swear first.”
“Meara…”
“Swear, Aja. I know how ya are. There’s only one way ya won’t break ya word.”
Aja took a deep breath. “I cannot swear by Shiva, but I will swear by all that is Shakti that I will not retaliate until I determine if there is a need to seek revenge for our unfair incarceration. And if they have done anything bad to Captain Pennington, I will kill them painlessly rather than making them suffer. How’s that?”
“No Aja… that will not do. Don’t think I won’t leave ya in there until ya have a real change of heart. Ya won’t believe what I’ve told ya until ya see for yarself, and I can’t let ya act against them now. If he considered you a threat, the one we shot would rip ya apart before ya could choke on that heathen death yell of yars. He calls her Lucy and seems to genuinely care about her.”
Deflated, Aja stumbled backwards and sank to the cot. “Holy Mother Goddess, I haven’t thought of the woman like that in over ten years. I trained my tongue not to say her real name and it won’t form it anymore.”
“I know. Neither will mine,” Meara declared. “But it fairly melts as it slides off his. There’s a ring of genuine caring in the way he speaks it.”
Aja sighed wearily. True help was impossible to find, but they had to trust now and again despite the odds. They had learned it was the only way to survive. “Very well, Irish. I swear by the six arms of Shiva I will do them no harm. Now let me out.”
Meara nodded and walked to the lock. She opened the cage door and swung it wide. “Welcome to the first day of the rest of yar free life, Aja Kapur.”
Aja rolled her eyes as she exited the cage. “No one is ever free, Irish. There’s always a catch. And where in the world did you get those clothes you’re wearing? You look like a school girl in them. That skirt barely covers your bottom.”
Meara looked down and smiled. “Well, at least I feel a little more normal. I hated being wrapped all in black like a fecking mourner. There’s a whole closet full of pretty things in Captain Pennington’s room. They wouldn’t fit her, of course, but I squeezed into these. I’m sure ya could find something there as well.”
Aja sighed. “Have they brainwashed you, Irish? Wait… how would you even know?”
Meara snorted at the insult, but then she thought about it and finally nodded. “I guess they have sort of brainwashed me if ya consider the fact Nero turned every code prompt off from both the Cyber Wife and the Companion programs. The stuff is all still in there, mind ya. But I can ignore it if I choose. Soon ya will see for yarself what I’m saying is true. Nero doesn’t know why I can’t do complex calculations though. He said we’d have a bit of a look at that wee problem later.”
“Have you forgotten they throttled your cognitive abilities because they thought you were too smart? They damaged your organic brain, Meara. Unless the man can help you grow it back, I’m not sure anything can be done. Don’t get your hopes up.”
“Yes, I know all that, but even so, I’m still more intelligent than most. I just express it differently. The whole math thing is highly over-rated as a problem solving strategy. There’s a world of answers you can get to by merely guessing. Haven’t I come up with some clever escape plans over the years?”
Aja nodded as they walked down a hallway devoid of guards as well as people. She had to fight every urge she had to drag Meara with her to the unsecured front door. “Yes. I will grant that you have come up with some very clever answers to our dilemmas at times.”
Meara laughed. “Right then… that’s why I choose to stay as I am. If the great and powerful Aja thinks I’m perfect, who am I to argue with her?”
Aja snorted. “I did not say you were perfect.”
And then she saw they had entered a room where their captain was stretched out on a normal bed. For once, Meara had not been exaggerating. The blonde bodyguard watched their approach warily. He really did look like he’d launch himself at her if she tried to further harm the injured woman.
“Eric, this seething woman is Aja Kapur. Aja, this is Eric Anderson. He’s Captain Pennington’s latest contract—accidentally as I understand it—but she processes him that way. He’s been watching over her.”
“Hello,” Eric said, looking at the woman. “I’m guessing you’re the one who shot me with the tranquilizer dart.”
Aja lifted a shoulder. “I can’t apologize for it. I was trying to save my captain.”
Eric chuckled and shook his head. “Yes, so I heard. And Lucy took you down trying to save me in return. Guess I can’t hold your efforts against you under those circumstances.”
Aja shrugged in apology instead of stating it. “They enhanced Captain Pennington more than us… but not because she was our military leader. The scientists who worked on us didn’t care about rank. Every time one of the women died in a failed experiment, Captain Pennington would volunteer for the next one to spare someone else. It was the only way she knew to try and save us.”
“Sounds like the version of Lucy I met this week.” Eric felt his lips tighten.
That hodge-podge testing probably explained why she was always malfunctioning. “You two seem to have dealt with your restorations well.”
Aja shrugged again as she walked closer. Trying to seem more casual than she was, she leaned down to look at her unconscious military superior. She hadn’t seen her captain up close in years. She raised her gaze and caught Eric’s sad one.
“There’s not another woman in the world like this one, which is why Meara and I never stopped looking for her. I don’t know where they’ve been hiding her all these years, but she pinged for us when you brought her to this location.”
“You must have been close by to have found us so quickly,” Eric said.
Aja shook her head. “No. Not really. We had to sneak across the Canadian border and past a couple of very impolite guard bots. After getting into the US territories again, tracking her down to this facility was the only easy part. Captain Pennington is pumping out code to draw us to her even like she is. But the pinging stopped when she was inside this building. I can tell she’s still making it, but I no longer ping back. I guess Dr. Cyberstein was more talented than he seemed.”
Eric leaned back in his chair, ignoring the veiled insult she made about Nero. “I guess that pinging you have with Lucy must be like what I have with my former Marine captain. He can send out a signal to us across great distances.”
Meara sighed. Her freshly washed hair brushed against her cheeks as she shook her head slowly.
“We can’t help but hear it. The woman’s hooked up to a fecking satellite and is able to pass signals between nearly all of the floating antennas in space around the earth. Her reach to find any of us is practically infinite. We don’t know what device or code they put in Captain Pennington to make that true. We spent years running from the pinging—and her—before we finally got tired of running and decided to confront her no matter what happened to us.”
Aja walked to the foot of the bed. “Captain Pennington managed to free some of us before the fucking cyber scientists stole what was left of her free will. The way I see it, she’s already died for me several times. Now I’m willing to die for her in return. I should have come after her years ago.”
Aja sighed raggedly when Meara’s arm went around her in comfort. She snorted at the lingering emotional pain, even as she leaned against her friend. It had been hard… very hard to see the woman in the bed changed into an unfeeling robot.
“It’s alright, Irish. I’m not going to get maudlin and look for someone to kill in the next ten seconds. I can see you were right about what you said, at least this one time. And I wanted the man to know the best and worst of her just in case Dr. Cyberstein fails to bring her back from the cybernetic dead like he did us.”
Eric’s gaze bounced between the women’s faces. They were like prisoners of war finally getting freed. He’d seen that uncomfortable, nervous look hundreds of times.
“Did she really go by Lucy? That’s what I call her, but I had no idea if I was right. She just looked more like a Lucy than a Lucille to me.”
Aja snorted. “Lucy is what Meara and I called her for the three years we went through academy together. If the woman preferred something else, she never said. Our academy sergeant tended to call Lucy obscene names trying to rile her into losing her temper. She’d glare at him with those icy blue eyes of hers until the man got worried about his balls. And rightfully so… our Lucy has an insane side… worse than mine even.”
Eric bobbed his head to show he was listening and understood. Plenty of his friends had gotten field promotions during the war. “So how did Lucy make captain and you two didn’t?”
“The woman had fecking stars in her eyes,” Meara exclaimed, going to the closet to look for Aja some different clothes.
“Stars in her eyes?” Eric repeated, turning his gaze to Aja whom he seemed to be able to understand better than her metaphor-loving sidekick.
Aja ignored his interested stare and started to pace. It was hard times to talk about and a harder situation to explain. “When the war became a hard reality around the world, it changed something in Lucy. Suddenly she had high military ambitions and a fierce need to see that our side won. She volunteered for the Cyber Soldier program the moment she heard about it.”
She took a deep breath and reversed her path. The room suddenly felt a lot smaller than it had moments ago. When claustrophobia hit, she paced to keep it constrained.
“Meara and I were scared shitless by the idea of having our human limbs replaced with prosthetics, but we couldn’t let Lucy head into that level of fighting alone. They made her captain because of the weapon she carries within her. We didn’t think it was a good idea to take such a burden on, even after her idiot husband offed himself and blamed her, but we couldn’t talk her out of it. She became Captain Pennington to us then and that’s how we think of her still.”
Eric scratched his chin as he thought about what Aja was sharing. “Meara told me you and Lucy were the only two female cyborgs able to disregard your programming when you needed to. She said your organic mind kept overriding every tweak.”
“Yes,” Aja said flatly. “I watched them take Lucille Pennington’s humanity from her one bloody piece at a time. Every tweak turned her more and more into a robot. The Companion Code was the game changer. Once they were assured of Lucy’s complete obedience to their every order, they gave her the global ability to control all of us. Essentially, they made Lucy do their dirty work. The three of us are all that survive from that global link. I know because all the others stopped pinging their locations. One-by-one they simply fell out of the group.”
“Actually, there are five of you left, but two female cyborgs are in medical with extensive brain damage. Dr. Winters is planning to test a new processor on them, but no one knows if the women will ever get their personalities back. It is not known what, if anything, of their organic minds have survived.”
Aja frowned and nodded. “That doesn’t surprise me. What females didn’t die during the experiments were subjected to all manner of abuse in other ways. I lost my temper one day and killed four scientists before they could stop me. The next version of the shutdown code got named in my honor. Lucy used it on us yesterday. It was not my proudest achievement to have made things worse for those of us left in the program, but then again, there are four less evil scientists in the world.”
Eric nodded grimly. If it hadn’t been for the war, would any of this have ever happened? Once he would have answered no. Now he knew better. The technology would have moved into any number of manufacturing situations. And commerce in human slavery had been always a problem on the planet. “I’m sure the real Lucy would like knowing the two of you escaped your deaths.”
“Maybe we haven’t,” Aja said, shrugging as she stared at him. “There are all kinds of ways to die and that’s especially true when you have an on-board computer instead of an organic brain.”
Meara walked back to Aja and held up a knee length dress with a slightly full skirt. “Here. Quit talking about what we can’t change. Look at this outfit. It should allow enough space for those ample breeding hips of yours.”
Aja sighed and started to protest, but the sadness in Meara’s gaze stopped her. She sighed a second time and took the dress to a nearby mirror, jerking it up and holding it to her body. The weird green shade wasn’t really her color, but the cut of the dress was nice enough.
“Your mocha skin is not flattered by that shade of green. You need a soft gold or a red.”
Aja’s gaze met Nero Bastion’s direct one in the mirror. “Oh? Do you moonlight as a woman’s personal dresser? I would have thought being a scientist paid better wages.” She watched Nero Bastion roll his eyes and walk towards Eric.
“I need access to Norton’s databases before I can do the rest of my testing. Peyton and Kyra agree we can transport Captain Pennington any time we wish.”
Eric nodded. “Marcus said they’ve improved her cell situation and made it less like a cage. I’m staying with her th
ere until she comes around. So long as Lucy remains in companion mode, everyone will be safer if I stay near her.”
Meara barked out a laugh. “Well, now that’s a fine story to tell to Dr. Cyberstein, Eric. But I’m thinking there might be a bit more than just duty involved in ya staying with our girl, am I right?”
“Dr. Cyberstein? Is that an insulting slur against my chosen profession?” Nero demanded, swinging his gaze to Aja’s.
Aja snorted and glared back. Really, the man was incorrigible. “How should I know what Meara means? I’m not the one talking out of both sides of my mouth.”
“Perhaps not, but Meara is respectful… and kind when not in your company. I am guessing you came up with that term long before she used it,” Nero declared.
“I have a much better term for you.” Aja raised a finger in the air. “Backrichod.
Nero strode across the floor intending to shake the woman until her teeth rattled, but suddenly found himself blocked by one of Meara’s arms across his chest.
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