Kingston 691

by Donna McDonald

  “I thought Peyton wanted to be present to observe the results after Captain Talon finished his assimilation.”

  Kyra nodded. “He did, but I sent him with Eric to check out the latest destruction efforts of Evelyn 489, whose real name is still a mystery. Apparently in her last round of cyclonic rage, in addition to destroying her bed again, she started spouting things about her military chip being used to torture her. Peyton’s more of an expert than I am on military code, so I sent him to talk to her about it. The real question is whether she’s capable of communicating in a sane manner.”

  “You’re always so calm. Doesn’t it freak you out that we’re talking about the woman who killed Jackson?” Nero asked.

  Kyra thought about it a moment and then shook her head. “No. It doesn’t. Peyton was programmed to kill me. That was the worst thing I could have ever imagined happening. What upsets me about Evelyn is she hasn’t responded to any of the creator commands I’ve tried using on her. Her total immunity to them alarms me more than anything else. Partly because I can’t help her, but it also means there could be other cyborgs running around in the same condition. For all I know, there could be any number like her that I won’t be able to help.”

  Nero looked back at his monitor to the man in the cage, who raked his pillow into the floor before he put his head in his hands for the millionth time. “What are we going to do about Captain Talon? He seems to be in a great deal of pain. We can’t just leave him in that condition.”

  “I’m going to go see him of course, and I’m going to hear what he has to say like I do with all of them. Eventually, I’ll get Captain Talon to Seetha so she can fix his legs, though she may need a chaperone given their traumatic history. I’ve got one in the operating chair this morning, and two more besides Captain Talon with issues that need addressing. On the first come, first served list, he’s actually in fourth place.”

  “I hear the trepidation in your voice, but I also see it in your face. He’s the one you’re most worried about. Is Captain Talon’s history with Seetha sincerely bothering you?”

  Kyra snorted and shook her head. “Oddly, no—I can buffer that—and Seetha is very tough. I’m just confused about his issues in the larger sense. Physical anomalies typically manifest immediately after the processor swap and first major reboot. Swapping out the processor is like pulling power from any device running mid-program. The mind loses its place and has to start everything over when the new processor takes control. That is what causes glitches in the prosthetics failing.”

  “All this I know,” Nero said.

  “But I saw him prowling around the cage after he woke up, and that’s on camera. Captain Talon’s legs were working just fine after the initial restoration. They stopped working somewhere in the middle of his data assimilation last night. Memories do not have the capacity to stop prosthetics from working.”

  Nero nodded. “Agreed—such coding would be nearly impossible. For that reason, this alarms me as well. I would prefer you take one of the original restored cyborgs in with you to talk to Captain Talon.”

  “Peyton and Eric are checking on Evelyn. King’s at the restaurant. I have no idea where Vince and Steve are. I guess I could see if Marcus could come chaperone. He still walks Rachel here everyday and might still be hanging around.”

  Nero nodded, glad she hadn’t fought him on the extra security measures. “Okay—sounds like a plan. Make sure Marcus is armed with his pulse cannon so he can deal with any surprises.”

  Kyra shook her head. “Can’t do that…security pitched a fit when Peyton accidentally wore his here. All he was doing was saying goodbye to me before he took off with King to retrieve Seetha. He’s the only cyborg who’s coded to walk through scanners with armed weapons, but other Norton employees found it highly disturbing. I don’t want to send up any more red flags.”

  Nero stared and held firm. “Captain Talon is our first cyborg rescued from a work camp. We don’t know what they do with cyborgs in those places, or how they keep them as obedient as all the AI units. This is just like when you restored Peyton. There could be many unknowns.”

  “I see your logic…and agree with the need for some additional precautions over our usual. Okay, I’ll have to get Peyton to send out a call for Marcus. I don’t have his personal number and Rachel still doesn’t carry a handheld. No one can convince her that not all communication technology is bad. I was hoping the voice box might change her mind about such things.”

  “If she doesn’t use a handheld, how does she order food to be delivered?” Nero asked, amazed at the woman’s attitude.

  Kyra shrugged. “Her domicile comes with a service for that, but I don’t think Rachel is the kind of person to eat fast food. Regardless of her age, she seems more the type to cook her own food and very carefully. Plus, she’s on a special diet right now until her throat heals.”

  “Is she speaking yet?”

  Kyra nodded. “A few words…and roughly. She told me it hurts badly to talk. Rachel’s lack of speech is one more problem case I haven’t been able to solve. The number of cybernetic mysteries seems to be growing.”

  Kyra sighed as they stepped out of Nero’s office and into the hall.

  He turned his head to smile at her. “The number of restored cyborgs who are going back to having normal lives is growing also. Keep your perspective, Dr. Winters…or should I say Elliot now. You did take vows with Peyton, didn’t you? I believe I was there.”

  Kyra chuckled. “Sometimes I forget you came from a culture that only a few centuries ago considered a married woman to be some sort of personal property for her husband. In my point of view, I am married, but not owned or adopted. I kept my own name with Jackson Channing. I plan to do the same with Peyton Elliott. Of course, he’s welcome to change his name to Winters if he wants. I wear the gold band he bought me. That’s enough of a public show of commitment and more than I ever imagined doing.”

  “Every time we talk about this, you make me sound like some throwback to an ancient civilization. Only once did I comment how I thought it would be appealing to meet a woman willing to share part of my identity. Sharing my name would make me feel as if the woman and I were sharing one life as a couple. Is that so wrong of me to desire that level of intimacy?”

  Kyra snickered at how offended Nero was, but it didn’t make his ideas more palatable. He was very unlikely in the modern world to find a woman willing to give herself so totally to a relationship. And as far as she knew, time travel remained a myth, so he was stuck relating to the free thinking females of the present.

  “No, Nero—of course it’s not wrong of you to want a woman to take your name. Chauvinistic, archaic, and narrow-minded, but I wouldn’t go so far as calling it wrong.”

  Nero rolled his eyes at Kyra’s sarcasm and glared as they walked together to her office. Once there she would use her personal handheld to contact the man she called husband, whatever the term meant for the two of them. In his opinion, Kyra would be shocked at how Peyton really felt, and his possessiveness wasn’t just because he was a cyborg.

  Nearly all men had the urge to cull the female herd for the choicest one. And when they found the one woman, it was only natural to take every measure possible to establish a connection that could never be challenged. Some men—like him—were just more up front about their methods.

  ***

  Anger she could handle. Tears were what she could not tolerate. Being a crier herself, she was always a sucker for the restored men who cried. Kyra slipped into the lab, noting the time of her entry on the wall monitor. Marcus wouldn’t arrive for another thirty minutes. She would have to be very careful until then.

  “Captain Talon? Hello. I’m Dr. Kyra Winters. Do you remember why you’re here?”

  She watched the man in the cage rub the moisture from his eyes and drop his hands.

  “Judging from how bad my head hurts, I’m guessing it’s so you can fuck with my brain some more,” William said.

  “Actually, I’m h
ere to help you, Captain Talon…as are a whole team of people. Our job is to restore you to your pre-war condition as much as possible, and give you back your human decision making. As we discussed yesterday, you’ve been in a mining work camp for a number of years—we weren’t really able to determine the exact number. We’re not really sure what you did there other than assist the guard bots.”

  “During the day, I assisted the work camp’s maintenance engineer. At the end of every day, I returned to my assigned rest area to guard the ore that was pulled out of the mine,” William said firmly.

  Kyra tilted her head. “Ore? Like precious metals?”

  “Gold, some silver, and some kind of metal I was programmed to forget the name of every damn day. I don’t know why.”

  “How much of an awareness did you have of what happened to you every day?”

  “Someone was always pulling my strings, and yes, I realized I was being controlled. I couldn’t stop it though…no matter how hard I tried…and I tried for years. Just before I woke up here, I had been reprogrammed multiple times in a two-day period. My processor was glitching something fierce. The headaches were almost incapacitating. I don’t recall who worked on me, why they did it, nor do I seem to have any data about what I was supposed to be doing different than usual tasks. Do we have to talk about this? It just makes the pain worse to discuss it.”

  “It can wait,” Kyra said, as she paced. “Why don’t you tell me about the trouble you’re having with your legs? I saw you struggling on the monitor.”

  William snorted and looked down. “Whatever you did fucking broke them.”

  “No,” Kyra declared, shaking her head with confidence. “They were working fine with your new processor. I have a recording of you walking around the cage for proof. Whatever happened to your legs happened after assimilation started last evening. What did you remember about your life outside your time in the work camp?”

  “I vaguely remembered being captured as a prisoner of war and tortured, but the details are gone. For reasons I never discovered, the enemy cut me loose just before the fighting was officially called off. I was debriefed, but again, I don’t recall the outcome. The stuff about the camp is not really memories. I got it from my military chip. It’s a set of orders. Are you trying to say I remembered something and it made my legs stop working?”

  Kyra shrugged as she thought about his lack of memories and frowned. He wasn’t screaming and ranting about his work camp experiences. She wanted to know why. The man was certainly angry about something.

  “We’ve fixed the occasional set of malfunctioning legs from cybernetic misfires after restoration. I’m sure we’ll be able to fix yours. But if we don’t find out what caused your prosthetics to break in the first place, you could find yourself routinely fighting this situation.”

  “Look, I don’t know anything more…Fuck…it just never stops hurting,” he said.

  Kyra watched William grab his head and rock his upper body. “Do you have a headache?”

  When he nodded, Kyra bit her lip. She didn’t like it when a soldier had physical pain and emotional trauma. The average restored cyborg didn’t have much physical pain after assimilation, just tons of emotional reactions to the process. What was different about William Talon? She hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary in his cybernetic panel and he wasn’t double-wired. Why did she feel like she had missed something?

  His rocking got to her. She couldn’t stop herself from offering him some solace.

  “What do you want to deal with first, Captain? Fixing your legs? Or resolving that terrible headache?” Kyra asked briskly, now intending to take some action the moment Marcus arrived. The headache might involve going back into his cybernetic panel. She would hate that, but she would do it, if necessary.

  “Legs first,” William said sharply. “Then I can run the hell out of here the first chance I get.”

  “I’m sorry for your extreme pain…and your circumstances. We’ll do all we can to help you. But I must warn you, I’m not great at giving attitude adjustments. If you want to hate me and have it matter, you’re going to have to take a number in the back of a very long line. If you want to leave here hating the world, that’s your prerogative too, but it’s a very bad way to start your first real chance at a do-over. You might want to try believing we only want the best for you.”

  Kyra watched as his hand fell away during a moment when the pain seemed to lessen…which was equally bizarre. His headache seemed to ebb and flow with his emotional reactions to her. Anger seemed to be the only one that eased the pain.

  “Lady, you have no idea about anything. If there is one lesson I’ve learned, it’s that I will never be truly free again. The military owns me, every last inch. I don’t know why you’re pretending any differently.”

  Kyra stared. “Care to explain those comments further? And for the record…I am not in the military. Like you, I just worked for them.”

  “No, I do not wish to explain. I’d like to keep my head on my shoulders for now. I may have need of it sometime soon. Just fix my damn legs. That’s all I want from you.”

  “Captain Talon, you don’t seem to have much to say about having been a captive in the work camp. What did you discover about the last decade during your data assimilation?”

  “Does it make you feel important to throw those big words around, Dr. Winters? I have no clue what you’re talking about and no desire to find out. I told you what I was assigned to do there and that’s all I know about it. If I could forget my own name, I’d be nothing but happy to give up my shitty life. Now could you just fix my fucking legs and stop harassing me about your cyber science crap?”

  Kyra tilted her head. Far from being offended by his demands, she was fascinated by his outburst. The man was not exhibiting any anger over having been a prisoner. He was just upset about his head hurting and his legs not working. It was like his assimilation of his time in the work camp had totally failed. Could that have really happened so completely?

  “I’ll be back shortly, Captain. I’m going to need some help to get you into a transport chair.”

  Kyra frowned as she saw the man rolling his eyes once more. She had only seen his level of anger, hate, and distrust in one other cyborg. Now she was married to him. Peyton hadn’t believed the truth of his liberation at first either.

  She closed the lab door behind her with a soft click. Something wasn’t right with William Talon’s restoration. More and more, she was theorizing it simply hadn’t taken place. But what could have blocked it?

  She needed to figure it out before he was released into a world he seemed to hate. Captain Talon would never be allowed to leave until she did.

  Chapter 16

  Seetha jumped back as a muscled arm swung out and whacked her just above her breasts.

  “Look out—rogue arm,” she exclaimed, laughing at the shock on her patient’s face as his unresponsive arm slid down and off her breasts. He caught it with his other hand before it fell completely. When he looked worried about her reaction, she patted his shoulder and laughed.

  “The boob graze was not your fault, Lieutenant. I obviously didn’t get something right.”

  “Sorry, ma’am.”

  Seetha snorted and rolled her eyes. “What is it with you military guys? Ma’am. Do I look like my mother? I mean I lost a few too many pounds, but my curves are coming back. I thought what I put on today made me look pretty damn good.”

  She smiled when the guy’s gaze instantly dropped to her legs and her boots. Her short dress was not practical for her new job, given wrong adjustments to a cyborg could obviously cause her to be knocked on her ass at any second. She had dressed this way for King, who was picking her up from work. She had wanted to look her best for him.

  “I agree you look damn good. What would you like me to call you, Engineer Harrington? And can I do it over dinner?”

  Seetha double-checked the settings. Indeed, one was missing. She fixed it and set the tip of the code tra
nsfer tool against his arm’s data port.

  “No copping another feel if this doesn’t work,” she warned, liking the way the man laughed at her teasing.

  After the transfer finished, he smiled, bent his arm, stretched it out, and then flexed it several times.

  Seetha blinked at the great results and sighed. “Good. Now that’s how a cybernetic arm is supposed to work. You’re all done, Lieutenant.”

  His serious blue gaze turned to hers again. “So did I hear a yes or no to dinner? I was being serious when I asked.”

  Seetha smiled to soften the blow. “I’m afraid I’ve already got more of a dinner date tonight than I know how to handle, but I sincerely appreciate the offer.”

  “Let’s leave it open then. I know where you work. I’m sure we’ll be seeing each other at some point in the future,” he said, rising from the chair.

  Seetha admired his well-formed backside as he sauntered from the lab, obviously happy to be in top working form again. She turned to see Rachel’s hands fisted on her hips, her gaze having followed the lieutenant’s toned ass out the door as well.

  A chuckle escaped without her permission when a fierce young glare was suddenly turned in her direction.

  “I am…young…and cute. Is it…the way…I sound? Freak…ing…bot…voice.”

  Seetha laughed aloud, happily charmed by the young woman’s envy. “No. It’s about your confidence—you don’t exhibit any around men. I’ve been flirting since I was a teenager. I’ve always liked men even though most give up after about five minutes in my company because I can’t fake being stupid. What you’re witnessing here with these cyborgs is just gratitude for the person who fixes their problem. That’s not real attraction, Rachel. That’s just them getting on with their life.”

  “He stared…at your legs…hard and long,” Rachel insisted, her mechanized voice not giving the statement the emphasis she felt.

  “He’s a man—they all do that—and cyborgs take it to another level altogether. Kingston West has his own damn category. Come to think of it, so does Peyton Elliott. You can tell why those two men are friends. One is as amazing as the other.”