Cyborg Seduction: A Science Fiction Cyborg Romance (Burning Metal Book 3)

by Lisa Lace

  When Rachel recovered from her journey up the hill, she took a moment to go through her options. She didn’t want the cyborgs to know what she was thinking, but they never stopped watching her. There was a soldier at the mouth of the cave, facing inside. Both she and Clayton had cyborg handlers. Wrath’s chair was in the center of the large room, but it was near the wall. The wall protected his back, and he could see everything that went on around him. More cyborgs were sitting or standing around the room. They all looked the same: big, mean, and angry. Rachel felt like she was in the middle of a pack of wolves and they were waiting for the right time to strike.

  Chapter Six

  It was clear that Clayton wanted to talk more, but the things he had said didn’t ring true. Wrath’s sensors could detect all the scientist’s vital signs and show that the scientist’s heart rate was increasing and his temperature rising. He could see through Clayton’s brave facade. Wrath didn’t understand why he was trying to fool anyone. The scientist knew that Wrath could analyze his biometrics, but he wouldn’t stop speaking. It was almost as if he thought the cyborgs were simpletons he could easily fool.

  With his gaze focused on the girl, Wrath activated his facial recognition program. He felt as though he should know her. Something more than the Cyborg Sector shirt set off alarm bells in his head. Wrath’s computers framed the woman’s face with a green box and went to work, evaluating the relative dimensions between her facial features and comparing them with profiles stored in his database. The tests were completed in seconds and all came back negative. She was someone new who he had never encountered before. That knowledge might work in his favor.

  Before he shut off the recognition database, the bright green lines surrounding Rachel’s face froze. He blinked rapidly, waiting for the box to disappear from his sight. Instead of vanishing, the green rectangle shifted to the side of his vision, and his system started to process the cave floor as a person. Wrath closed his eyes, waiting impatiently for the computer to reset.

  When his eyesight returned to normal, he leaned forward in the chair and stared at the girl. “What is your name and rank?”

  Rachel’s plump bottom lip quivered as she stared at the cyborg. Something inside him was attracted to her. He had to remember that she was the enemy, no matter what she looked like or how innocent she seemed. Her appearance was probably part of her game.

  “My name is Rachel Halliday,” she finally stuttered. “I don’t have a rank. I’m just a reporter with World Community News.” Her hands fidgeted in her lap, alternately coming together and breaking apart.

  “Why have you come here?” Wrath didn’t understand why Cyborg Sector would have sent a small, untrained woman to infiltrate Green Squad. The pale girl wasn’t a real adversary. Her only weapon was her beauty: soft skin, large eyes, and silky hair. He could easily overcome that.

  Rachel shrugged uncertainly. “It was an assignment. I came because I had to.” She glanced at the scientist, who was beginning to recover from the assault. “I was just doing my job, you know?”

  He wasn’t satisfied with her answers. They seemed too simple. Was she intentionally being vague to hide something from him? “And what, exactly, is your job?”

  “I told you before - I’m a reporter. I give other people a way to learn about what’s happening here without them having to be here. Finding a lost cyborg patrol is a big deal, and I’m supposed to explain things on television.”

  Wrath impatiently closed his eyes. The woman was useless. The squad commander needed actionable information, and he wasn’t sure he could get it from a television personality. “I know what a reporter does, but I don’t think that’s the only reason you are here. If you were a typical journalist, you would have turned and fled down the mountain as soon as we killed the rest of your party.”

  He studied her face with his natural vision, waiting for her to give him a sign that he was on the right track. The only emotions he detected were awe and fear. He decided to try again. “Do you think I’m going to believe that you came up here and risked your life for a job?”

  Rachel’s eyes darted to Clayton once again. She opened her mouth to speak then shut it before saying anything. Wrath couldn’t help noticing that her mouth was pleasant and tempting. She had full, succulent lips that fired up parts of his system that had been inactive for a long time. He tried to suppress his base instincts as he analyzed the humans in front of him. Her glances at the scientist suggested that the two were working together.

  “He was the only other person alive,” she finally stammered. “I couldn’t go off into the desert by myself.”

  Wrath shook his head. The woman would never have made it back to civilization on her own. Now her best chances at survival were an idiot scientist and a group of angry cyborgs. He stood up and took several long strides across the cave floor until he loomed over her. Rachel looked up, making her hair cascade down her back and accentuate her green eyes. She looked innocent underneath the cyborg, and it made Wrath want to take full advantage of her.

  “I don’t think your presence here has anything to do with delivering a story. The only story is the one you’re telling me. You and the asshole over there” — Wrath gestured to Clayton — “were supposed to serve as a distraction. His assignment was to tempt us with the luxuries of life at Cyborg Sector while you tried to seduce us. We would be vulnerable, and the rest of the team could come to kill us.” The plan sounded ridiculous, but they couldn’t have had another strategy. They would not be able to defeat the Green Squad in a fair fight.

  The girl shook her head frantically, sending her hair flying around her shoulders. “No. You’re wrong. I don’t know what the scientists were going to do besides negotiate and try to bring you back. The other reporters and I were told to watch everything from a safe distance.” Tears welled up in her eyes, and they soon spilled over onto her cheeks. “I don’t want to hurt you. I just want to go home.”

  Wrath took in a deep breath. Why did the woman have to be so emotional? This interrogation would have been far easier if it was with other cyborgs. Even the terrorists had presented fewer problems than these humans.

  He leaned down, placing his face only inches away from the reporter. He could smell the salt of Rachel’s tears and the musk of her body. Underneath it all was the faint odor of fading perfume. The combination was intoxicating, and Wrath quickly shut down his olfactory sensors. “I’m sorry if you haven’t realized this yet, but you aren’t going home.”

  The girl cried harder, burying her face in her hands. Wrath left her curled up in a ball on the sandy floor as he returned to his seat on the opposite wall. Clearly, she was playing a trick on him and trying to make him think she was innocent. He knew she wanted to manipulate him.

  He signaled Weapon to continue watching the prisoner. The battle strategist nodded and grinned. He would have his fun with the reporter when everyone else finished with her.

  Chapter Seven

  Clayton was back on his feet. He still had the swollen appearance of someone on the wrong side of a gut punch. His cheeks were red, and one of his eyes was swollen shut. Wrath didn’t need to use any of his specialized vision functions to know that Wire’s blow had affected Clayton more than just physically. The human’s confidence had dissipated like vapor into the desert air. He stood slightly slouched and always had an eye on the cyborgs.

  “Your time is running out, human. My patience grows thin. You have not given me a reason to keep you alive. If you tell me the truth now, there is a chance that I might let you live.”

  Wrath knew he would have to kill the scientist no matter what. The two humans could not be allowed to get away and give Cyborg Sector accurate information about their numbers and position, especially since Clayton had correctly guessed that their cybernetic parts were failing.

  Clayton sighed. “Everything I said was the truth.”

  The words were barely out of Clayton’s mouth before Wrath launched himself out of his seat, prepared to pummel the li
es out of him. The human put up his hands and began speaking again.

  “I know it sounds bad, but I wasn’t lying! Cyborg Sector had a problem with communications. They sent you orders to return to a particular set of coordinates for extraction after you completed the mission. I saw the records myself. You never responded or showed up so we could get you.” There was fear in the scientist’s eyes, but he looked earnest.

  “If what you say is true, why didn’t anyone come to get us?” Wrath challenged. “Cyborg Sector knew where we were. Would it have been that hard to locate us?”

  The cyborg didn’t regret staying behind. Living in the desert was better than being trapped in a box. Wrath could remember what it felt like being stuck in a cage. There was barely enough room to stand in it. But something inside the cyborg had wanted to know the reason no one had ever come back for Green Squad. Now he had a chance to find out.

  Words flew out of Clayton’s mouth. “That’s exactly what they would have done if they had been able to find any of you. Something happened with the communication devices built into your biochips. Usually, Cyborg Sector can easily track a cyborg’s movements and pinpoint a cyborg’s location within a few feet. But your GPS tracking signals vanished soon after your deployment. They assumed Green Squad and the terrorist faction had obliterated each other.”

  Wrath shook his head. “Something’s missing here. If everyone were dead, it would have been safe for them to come out here and do a visual confirmation. Are humans so fearful of us that they will not even come near a dead cyborg?”

  “I don’t know,” Clayton admitted. “Dr. Green might have, but he’s dead now. We won’t understand everything, but we’re here now. It’s late, but we came back.”

  The cyborg leader turned his back on the scientist as he began pacing the room. His system was processing a lot of new information. It was struggling to keep up with everything. Clayton’s story was far different than what he and his squad had believed. He didn’t know if the scientist was telling the truth or lying, and there was nothing in his programming to help him distinguish between the two. “Why are you here now? If Sector believed we were dead, what happened to change their minds?”

  Clayton leaned against the wall with Wire standing next to him. “Some tourists had come out here to hike and camp, and they got lost. But they saw something while they were here. When they finally made their way out, they began spreading stories of a group of men living in the wilderness. The forest rangers had been told to keep an eye out for anything odd, and they immediately reported it. They didn’t specify what to look for. The hikers thought they had found aliens, and this was Roswell all over again.” Clayton shook his head and grinned. He could hardly believe what he was saying himself. “The information eventually made its way to Cyborg Sector and here we are.”

  “That’s impossible. No one could have seen us without me knowing about it.” Wrath queried the rest of Green Squad, but none was willing to admit they had run into humans. He should have realized they weren’t as isolated as he’d imagined. They had grown lazy after months of downtime and should have been more careful. “What do they intend to do with a group of cyborgs now that they know we’re here? We don’t plan on returning to a life of being controlled by humans.”

  Clayton seemed to be getting more comfortable the longer he talked. He started gesturing emphatically with his hands again like it would force his thoughts into the cyborgs’ brains. “We began closing Cyborg Sector soon after Green Squad came out here. There was a lot of political pressure to stop creating cyborgs until we could figure out how it was affecting their brains. We started asking moral questions about whether or not cyborgs are human and have souls.”

  “Don’t you call me by that name,” Wrath snarled. “We are nothing like you.”

  “I can see that,” the scientist answered quickly. “What I’m trying to say is that Cyborg Sector now is much different than Cyborg Sector a year ago. They’ll upgrade your biochips and make sure everything is working properly. They also have a procedure that will rewire your brain. The biochips are designed to route information around certain parts of the brain and bypass everything except what is necessary to kill. They can reverse those changes. After that, you’ll go through a rehabilitation process and eventually be released from Cyborg Sector to live on your own.”

  Wrath glowered at the man in front of him. “Are you telling me that they want to make us human?” He huffed out a breath of air that could almost have been a laugh. “What if we don’t want to become human?” Wrath raised his voice. “Is there a single cyborg here who wants what this man is offering?” Green Squad roared a chorus of “No’s.” The sound shook the walls. Wrath smirked at the look of terror on Clayton’s face.

  “I don’t think you understand,” Clayton protested. “You used to be human. They make cyborgs from people who are about to die. People who donated their bodies so that they could live on even after their deaths and save the lives of others. Recovering your humanity is a gift, not an insult.”

  “It’s not?” Wrath asked, weighing this new information and deciding whether or not Clayton was trustworthy. “You come in here claiming that I used to be a human. How can you expect me not to be insulted? What do you know about living as a cyborg? Tell me, human, what do they do with cyborgs who don’t want to live like this? What if a cyborg refuses to abide by Cyborg Sector’s rules?”

  Clayton clamped his lips tightly together. When he finally spoke, he barely opened them. “We destroy them.”

  “Really. Is that your job? Do you think you can kill soldiers like me?” Wrath advanced to stand in front of the scientist. The cyborg knew that he didn’t need to work hard to intimidate the man, but he felt like showing off.

  “No, of course not. I’m not sure what happens to them, to be honest. I’ve only heard rumors. I’ve never actually seen them do it.” Clayton was shaking visibly now.

  A background program in Wrath’s head brought something to his attention. “You keep using words indicating you are not from Cyborg Sector. They. Them. You act as though you are part of Cyborg Sector, but your words tell me you are not.”

  Clayton hung his head. “I’ve only been with them for a few months. I was brought in as a consultant to help them shut down. All of my knowledge comes from research and a few conversations with the actual scientists.”

  A small chuckle erupted from Wrath’s lips, and it slowly built into a full roar. “You have some balls, at least. I have to give you credit for that.” He pointed a finger at Clayton’s chest. “Balls won’t be enough to save you.”

  Chapter Eight

  Rachel blinked rapidly in a futile attempt to chase her tears away as she watched Wrath interact with Clayton. She couldn’t believe what she’d heard. Although she understood the basics about cyborgs, she had never been terribly interested and preferred not to think about them at all.

  Now that Rachel couldn’t avoid thinking about them constantly, her opinions about cyborgs were starting to change. The media had always treated them like a sensational news story or a way to get good ratings, not like people who had once been human and now were something else. How had she missed important issues such as the quality of their lives after Cyborg Sector rehabilitated them? Cyborgs were the epitome of intimidation, but they still deserved basic unalienable rights.

  Clayton’s revelation about being a consultant instead of a scientist wasn’t surprising. In fact, it explained some things about him. On the way to New Mexico, he had wanted to keep the media far away from the cyborgs’ territory because he didn’t want anyone to discover the gaps in his knowledge. Things were different when he saw the opportunity to steal glory and be a hero. The situation had changed for the consultant. The only glory he was going to see was if he were a martyr for the anti-cyborg movement.

  As Wrath tried to extract information from Clayton, Rachel’s mind returned to the thoughts she’d had when she first saw the cyborg. She was sure she had seen him before. More than that, she
thought she knew him. She believed the man Wrath resembled was dead. Robert had gone to war and died in battle. Was her mind playing tricks on her because the two were similar looking? Everyone was supposed to have a lookalike somewhere in the world. Maybe this cyborg was Robert’s double.

  But the more she studied him and listened to the conversations he had, the more she became convinced that this was no mere doppelgänger. Wrath was a little wider and more heavily built than she remembered, and his hair was longer. Although the years as a soldier and the months in the desert had changed him, he still had the same generous mouth, bold nose, and flashing eyes. She felt sure that she had known Wrath when he was still human. Rachel had touched his face, kissed his lips, and run her hands down his broad chest.

  Rachel shifted uncomfortably on the cave floor as she realized she might have known the cyborg before. Weapon twitched, ready to shoot her if necessary, but she wasn’t planning to go anywhere. She didn’t want to die. The reporter looked up at the soldier guarding her. Rachel hadn’t been able to get a good look at him when he captured her on the hillside because of the glaring sun. Now, in the dim light of the rocky den, she could make out the features on his face. His skin looked rough, rugged, and burnished from his time in the sun. A long, jagged scar ran down the middle of the cyborg’s face, making him look even more terrifying than before. Rachel wanted to put some distance between them, but she knew he would move closer if she inched farther away. Weapon hadn’t been more than a foot away from her since he had found her.