I won’t allow him to strike anything vital. Their mental conversation occurred in the span of a second.
Gareth reached back and touched Thandie, who touched Viljoen, and one by one the others made subtle contact, creating a chain of telepathic thought to coordinate the operation. Once it seemed they were all on the same wavelength, Xander made his move and lurched forward.
“No!” Kaiden squeezed the trigger with the barrel already trained on Xander. The impact shattered a protective plate of his combat armor and punched down to the bone. He stumbled and dropped to one knee while the others rushed in according to the plan.
Thandie pitted the strength of her cybernetic arm against Kaiden’s weight to pin him down from one side. Viljoen and Chang took him from the right and practically laid their bodies across his torso to secure him to the ground. He bucked wildly and drove one of his knees into Viljoen’s side. The commander grunted out in pain.
“Now, Fairchild!” Viljoen ordered.
Gritting through the pain, Xander sat heavily on the ground and fetched two additional tranquilizers from his personal medipack. His instincts were rarely wrong, and his intuition told him one dose wasn’t going to be enough.
Fairchild dove in and jabbed the auto-ejecting tranquilizer against the outer aspect of Kaiden’s thigh. As she slammed it home, it cracked and the needle snapped.
“No good!” Fairchild reported. “He’s got cybernetic muscle weave beneath his skin.”
“Catch!” Xander hurled the second toward her. “Inject it into the jugular!”
Kaiden threw an elbow back into Chang’s face, shattering the demolition-grade plasteel faceplate. “I won’t go back there!”
Thandie jerked back. “Holy shit! Cybernetic arms, too!”
Kaiden’s larger size and superior reach granted him the advantage in the fight, but Thandie moved faster and with more flexibility. She threw her weight against him and wrapped her arms and legs around him in a full-body hold.
“Stick him already, dammit!” Thandie cried.
“Viljoen, secure him from the right,” Xander barked out, leaping in with Fairchild and jabbing with the third injector. “Kruger has it handled on her side.”
The injector pumped Kaiden with milky fluid, and then the true fight began. He buried the soles of his feet against the ground and shoved.
“Hold him until it works!” Fairchild screamed.
Between the combined efforts of the marines and the potent mix of sedatives, the fight slowly drained from Kaiden Lockhart. He feebly pushed and shoved until his eyes rolled back and his jaw became slack.
None of them dared to move.
“Is he out for good?” Thandie grunted, wedged halfway beneath the heavy man. She tried to shove him off but barely managed to nudge him an inch. “How the hell much can one guy weigh?”
Viljoen helped pull her out. “Damn, he’s strong as an ox.”
“Sort of glad you put us through the ringer on the mats, Commander. Longest ground tussle of my life,” Chang complained. The man sagged against a tree while Davis tended to his bleeding face. Jagged shards from his shattered faceplate were embedded in his cheeks.
With the worst over, Xander began his own field dressing. Applying it one-handed took more skill than he anticipated.
“Here, let me help.”
“I’ve got it. Kruger, you see to Kaiden.”
Thandie ignored him and pulled the shredded remnants of his shoulder piece, revealing the dark blood soaking the uniform beneath it. “Let me help you, your hand is shaking. Here, I can—”
“I said I fucking have it.”
She flinched and dropped her hands. “As you say, sir.”
He regretted his tone immediately and tried to cast aside his feelings; he needed an obedient marine, not a lover right now. Cool logic didn’t change the way his stomach twisted in turmoil, and Xander knew if their positions were reversed, he’d have done the same thing.
Chapter Twenty-One
Thandie reclined on her bunk and gazed up at the ceiling above her. A poster collage of her favorite family photos decorated the formerly bland gray surface.
“Sergeant Thandie Kruger, you have a new message from Commander Xander Vargas,” Jem said.
Thandie jerked her attention toward the speaker aperture located in the corner of the room. “Go ahead and play it, Jem,” she replied to the ship A.I.
“Report to my office in medical, Sergeant Kruger. Now.”
Shit.
“Uh-oh,” Angela muttered. “What did you do?”
Thandie ignored her bunkmate and hastily slipped back into her uniform, heart pounding. She had a solid guess what he wanted to talk to her about. Before heading out, she dampened her fingers and ran them through her hair to tame the disheveled strands.
Xander’s office door took on an intimidating presence, one she steeled herself against with both palms pressed over the cool surface. Once her racing heart calmed, she knocked.
“Come in.”
Thandie stepped inside, muscles tense. She closed the door behind her and stood at attention in front of Xander’s desk. She focused on a spot over his shoulder because she couldn’t meet his dispassionate gray eyes.
“You wanted to see me, sir?”
“Would you like to tell me what you were doing down there, and why you disobeyed my order?”
“I saw our medical officer bleeding out and struggling to treat himself.” It came out before she could tame her tongue. Xander wasn’t amused.
“I must be mistaken. I wasn’t aware of your medical training, Sergeant Kruger.”
Thandie opened her mouth to speak but quickly snapped it shut. She swallowed back her protest, stomach churning. It wasn’t the first time she’d been subjected to a reprimand or stern words from a ranking crewman, but it cut deeper coming from him.
“It’s recently become apparent to me that we’ve surpassed the point of maintaining a professional relationship. There’s also no room on our squad for a marine who can’t follow my orders.”
His words carried the same effect as dousing her with a bucket of ice water. She was numbed initially, and then furious, the anger sweeping through her until the heat of it reached the top of her ears. “Permission to speak freely, sir.”
He nodded and leaned back in the seat.
“With all due respect, sir, but if you have a problem with me being on this team, then you need to deal with it. Yes, I tried to help you instead of tending to Kaiden, but my actions hurt no one and pulling rank on me like this is crap.”
“Is that all?”
She swallowed back another bitter retort and nodded. “Yes, sir.”
“You’re dismissed, Sergeant. We’ll speak later outside the office.”
Thandie snapped to attention, turned about-face, and strode out without another word. She didn’t trust herself, even if she had the breath to speak. Without looking, it felt as if every eye in medical followed her on the way out.
She made it out the department’s door before the first tears slipped down her cheeks. The path ahead of her became the least of her worries, right up until she sped around a corner and bounced into a solid wall of chest. The most muscled chest she’d ever seen in an officer’s uniform.
“Kruger?”
Kill me, now. Please. Running into the CO, literally, seemed like the worst sort of luck on top of a day gone so horribly wrong.
Her face warmed to a feverish temperature. “I’m so s-sorry. I should have been paying attention.”
“Toss the formalities into the rubbish for a moment. Now, what’s wrong? What have I missed?”
Thandie shook her head, wishing she had a hole to crawl away into. If it was possible to die from shame, she’d be a stone-cold corpse at his feet.
“It’s n-nothing, sir.”
“We’ll have a jaunt through the bio-farm, then. Come on. I’m told by one of my officers that it’s the cool place where all of the kids like to snog these days. Let’s go have ourselves
an eyeful.”
Commodore Bishop left her little choice in the matter. His hand settled on her back between her shoulder blades, guiding her down the passageway.
He even offered her a handkerchief. The gentlemanly gesture caught her by surprise.
“Take your time.”
His kindness opened the floodgates. Thandie couldn’t stop her tears, so she focused on not blubbering—on controlling her breathing and pulling it back in like a proper marine.
“Are you feeling better now?” Once she nodded, he continued. “The poor sod didn’t dress you down in front of the rest of medical, did he?”
“Doctor Vargas called me to his office, sir, to address my insubordination. He was right to.”
“I read his report. Sounds to me like he was being obstinate. Doctors are like that, you know.”
She hesitated to say anything, so opted for silence.
“Look, Kruger, I’ve seen your record. I know you’re an exemplary marine. That’s why I requested you for assignment on the Jemison. That hasn’t changed.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Thank yourself. And don’t let this hiccup throw you off your game.”He punched in something on his personal display. A subtle beep from her badge indicated a change in her duty status. “Go clean up and relax for the day. I’ll handle our mutual friend.”
“Thank you, sir, but you don’t need to do that. I didn’t mean to trouble you.” Thandie offered the handkerchief back to him.
“Keep it. I’ve got a thousand of them for the enlisted.” The commodore strode away.
Thandie remained beneath the trees a few minutes longer, wondering if she’d be forced to choose between the team she loved and the man she treasured.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Xander loathed invasive neuro procedures, but he’d learned to do them for epileptics and to cure other brain abnormalities during his surgical residency. Arms and legs were basic performance modifications, but none of those were potentially life-threatening issues. If he botched a job by misplacing a cybernetic leg’s nerve connection to the hip socket, no one died. He simply opened the patient’s incisions and tried again.
The human brain required absolute precision. Doctors relied on virtual enhancements, droid-assisted surgery, nanobots, and software protocols to perform necessary neurosurgeries. For that reason, and that reason alone, he had no intention of physically delving into Kaiden Lockhart’s skull. An hour of exploration with the NORI machine told him everything he needed to know and confirmed that the blueprints in Campbell’s database referred to Kaiden.
Fairchild dabbed Xander’s brow with a cloth while he made the incisions with his surgical laser. Anxiety beaded his forehead with sweat, almost to the point of distraction. One wrong move could activate Kaiden’s internal defenses and instantaneously counteract the sedatives in his bloodstream.
“Never seen anything like this,” Xander muttered as he opened a window into the cyborg’s chest. The layer of synthetic skin peeled away to reveal Kaiden’s metal-plated bone structure. Plasteel-laced bone guarded his interior organs, most of which appeared to be improved or replaced by machinery.
“As you can see, they’ve augmented roughly 60% of his skeletal structure with a reinforced periosteum. Both arms are prosthetic with reinforced shoulder joints.”
Davis took her position at the opposite side and assisted with holding the small incision open. Kaiden’s sternum split open down the middle once unbolted and pried apart, designed for easy access.
“Overhead lights: swivel fifteen degrees starboard, thirty degrees downward,” Xander commanded the surgical theater’s artificial intelligence. “God, would you look at this, Oshiro.” The micro-camera on his tools projected a live-time feed on the monitor to the doctor observing on the other side of the glass. “His heart has a complex filter to separate the cybernetic lipids from his bloodstream. You see, humans need blood, but blood clots in cybernetic parts. Causes blockages. Kaiden doesn’t have to worry about that.”
Or plenty of other things, Xander realized. The boy was an anomaly, constructed piece by piece to such a degree that more machine existed than man. At the very least, the ratio was close.
“According to the notes from Campbell’s files, they added a failsafe. If I remove it now, that’s one less concern to trouble us later,” Xander muttered.
“His vitals are steady. The suspended microparticles seem to be holding the sedatives in his system,” Lil reported from the side of the room. Her sole job was to keep Kaiden under.
“All right, I’m going in.”
A series of leads connected to Kaiden’s heart, wiring him like a ticking time bomb. First, Xander snipped the signal relay. Someone out in the galaxy held Kaiden’s life in their hands, and Xander would be damned if they ended it now. Second, he cut the feed from the electrical current along with its backup supply to be absolutely safe. Xander performed the operation as dictated by the manual until the cardioverter was no longer a threat to Kaiden’s life. He dropped the device into the metal tray O’Reilly held.
If he hadn’t gotten his hunch about Campbell, saving Kaiden wouldn’t have been possible without floundering in the dark. It took less time to close him up than it did to open him. In ten minutes, Bio-sutures and medical grade glue restored him to near-perfect condition. Their patient was none the wiser, but his medical staff only relaxed once they returned him to observation status.
“Do you have that thing cleaned up, O’Reilly?”
“Right here, sir.”
The round device looked like any other pacemaker at first glance. They worked off a kinetic power source, converting movement from the beating heart itself to keep their charge. This one had been heavily modified to release a lethal shock.
Xander set it beneath a magnifying scope and brought the display up for everyone to observe. The enhanced image revealed small details the human eye alone would miss. A small series of numbers were etched into a chip on the cardioverter next to a faded pictogram. Oshiro magnified the image further.
“It looks as though they tried to acid wash the serial away.”
“Yeah, but they couldn’t all the way without compromising the integrity of the chip itself. This logo looks vaguely familiar, too.”
Oshiro stepped over and laid his hand on Xander’s back. “Go and rest. You will need fresh eyes to solve this, Xander, and you have been running on fumes.”
“But—”
“No excuses. Kaiden is safe now. O’Reilly can take this down to Intel and let them research it while I keep an eye on our patient.”
Xander sighed. “Take it directly to Lieutenant Shahid, O’Reilly. No one else. Ask her to please find out all she can about it and its manufacturers.”
“Will do, sir.”
While Kaiden remained in hibernation under Oshiro’s watchful eye, Xander retreated to his office and tended to his own needs after pulling up a chair to a small mirror. He removed his scrub top and peered down at the jagged line of staples across the front of his shoulder. Sloppiest work he’d ever done on himself, and he didn’t know whether he had Thandie to blame for the distraction, or if his hand had shaken as much as she claimed.
Ethan stepped in and took one look at him. “That looks like shite. Did you let a local monkey stitch you up?”
Xander grunted and continued to pluck the staples from his skin. “It’s not that bad. The bloody tosser fired a shatter round at me. It was a piece of armor that punctured my skin—not the bullet.” He dropped the final staple into the tray and sagged in his seat. It would heal on its own in a couple days.
“Ah, I see.”
The simple words carried more than one meaning. Xander sighed. “What do you want, Ethan? Kaiden is stable, and I’ll be back to work as soon as I finish this. I actually planned to call you down once I reviewed the surgical exam.”
“You work too hard, but in this instance, I understand. Still, that’s not why I’ve come. I wanted to see if you were serious about this r
equest. A reassessment is a bit dramatic, isn’t it?”
Xander paused with his back to his friend. Ethan knew how to read him as well as Oshiro did, and that meant he had to keep it cool. “Are you officially questioning my judgment, Commodore?”
“Maybe. Or perhaps I’m simply trying to get a better handle on what happened.”
“I am merely reporting that I have entered into a personal relationship with a marine on my squad. I can’t have a member of our team playing favorites, nor can I be accused of doing the same.”
“Of course not, but did anyone play favorites today?”
Xander stiffened. “I gave a very clear order to attend to the man we landed to rescue. She ignored it.”
“According to Viljoen’s report, Thandie is the one who pinned him down after he shot you. Seems like he was well attended.” Ethan spread his hands. “Look, Xander, I know how hard onboard relationships can be. Why the hell do you think I avoid entanglements?”
“Yes, and then you behave like a randy, ill-bred canine the moment we disembark from our ship. Not to mention your online behavior.”
Ethan grimaced. “As we’re having a personal discussion and not an official one, I’ll accept that. Anyway, this is about more than avoiding preferential treatment. If it had been anyone else on the team, would you be requesting a transfer?” When he didn’t respond, the commodore continued. “Let’s say I humored your request. If I put her on the boarding team, are you going to be useful, or are you going to be pacing the medical wards like a caged drake? I refuse to waste her talents in the armory.”
“Maybe I’ve decided to end it and follow my commanding officer’s lead, you bloody hypocrite.”
“Oh, of course. End it and make the woman cry. Then you’ll be in your cot doing the same bloody thing by midnight, you wanker. Once this mission is complete, I’ll support whatever you choose… but I want you to know this, Xander: your Eloran is gone, but you’ve got a fine woman right here who cares as deeply. Don’t ruin it. Don’t chase her away because you haven’t the slightest clue about how to handle a shred of authority. You, most of all, know how much you deserve happiness.”
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