Cyborg Heat: A Science Fiction Cyborg Romance (Burning Metal Book 1)

by Lisa Lace

  Most people knew deep down that the Nine had to have something to do with it, but they didn’t want to admit it to themselves. So even when more and more of their kind started dropping like sitiriz flies, they held on to their belief that it had to be some sort of natural thing. They came up with all manner of excuses. The cold cycle was just colder than usual, the harvest cycle had been harder on the elderly. The disease was spreading from person to person faster than they could contain it.

  That last part was actually the closest to the truth.

  Once the medics started getting ill from the people they were trying to treat, all the diseased ones were rounded up and walled away in a quarantine.

  But even that didn’t help.

  Warriors and guards started falling ill next, and with the new wave of disease came the madness. People would go into fever states and lash out at their friends and family. At first, they could be calmed down and put to bed and they would wake up in the morning with no recollection of what had happened, but as it went on, it was harder and harder to pull people back from that brink until it became impossible.

  The only way to quell someone who was suffering from the madness was to kill them, and if that didn’t happen, eventually they would end up hurting themselves.

  Lilera had discovered this the hard way when her father had succumbed to it, leading to her having to take him out. Having their leader on a murderous rampage would have been a really bad thing.

  Once it had reached that point, there was no denying that the Nine were behind it. It was just like the stories Sabin had told his friends all those years ago. Just like his mother had described to him, and every day this went on, Sabin watched her become more and more withdrawn.

  She’d already managed to survive one attack by the Nine, back when she was a young girl living somewhere else, and Sabin could tell that she didn’t think she’d be lucky enough to survive another.

  Every time he went to see her, she begged him to be careful, and he promised that he would, but part of his duty was to keep the people safe at the expense of his own life if necessary.

  When he got to the stone gate and saw the commotion there, he was pretty sure this was going to be one of those situations where he was going to have to put himself in danger to keep people safe.

  Osu had been a scrawny young one, but he’d grown out of that fast. Now he wasn’t as tall as Sabin, but he was definitely more muscular, and the weapon he had in his hands was deadly. It could cut through the strongest metals or stones on their planet, and there was no way it wouldn’t do the same to a person’s body.

  He was waving it around threateningly, and as Sabin had been informed, just screaming. There weren’t any words coming out his mouth, either. Just high pitched screams of what seemed to be pain and fury.

  “Osu!” Bristel called to him, getting close with his hands held up. “Osu, stand down.”

  “Bristel!” Sabin shouted as he made his way over. “That is not going to help.”

  Bristel turned to look at him, and his eyes were hard. “Then what do you suggest, Captain?” There was bitterness in Bristel’s voice when he said it, but then, there had been bitterness between the two of them for a good long while now. People seeming to defer to Sabin when he was just captain of the guard definitely didn’t help.

  Sabin was the better fighter, but Bristel was technically in charge.

  “I suggest you getting away from him, or didn’t you see the weapon in his hand?” Sabin shot back. They didn’t have time for this. Someone had to neutralize Osu before this turned out even worse. “Don’t let him touch you, Bristel.”

  “Or what? Do you think this is some childhood story come to life?”

  Anger flared in him, but he kept his mouth shut for the time being. Nothing was going to be solved by them screaming at each other. “Just get away from him,” Sabin settled for saying.

  “You don’t get to give me orders!” Bristel snapped. “I’m in command here. We are better than this. We are the Samis Das, for Creators’ sake.”

  “And where has that gotten us?” Sabin wanted to know. “We’re practically helpless here.”

  “If you’re going to talk like that, you can be relieved of your post,” Bristel snarled at him. “If you’re going to talk of defeat. You’re no warrior.”

  “I don’t have a death wish, either!”

  “Coward,” Bristel spat. “No one should look to you for answers. You’re as helpless as a newborn baby when it comes to trouble. You come running, and for what? To do what, Sabin? How can you protect anyone if you’re too afraid to lift your weapon?”

  Despite Bristel’s words, Sabin knew there was fear there. It was impossible to be under the eyes of the Nine (assuming they had eyes, at least) and not be afraid.

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Osu closing in. He saw the wildness in his eyes and his finger on the trigger of his weapon. But there was no way he could get there fast enough, and Bristel was still ranting, his back to Osu.

  Sabin opened his mouth to shout a warning, but it was too late. A deadly beam of white hot light sliced through the air and Bristel’s head along with it, leaving everyone speechless.

  Bristel stood for a moment, mouth open, eyes wide, and then his body fell to the ground in a bloodless heap, crumpled as the wound in his head steamed.

  “Sir,” someone called, and it took Sabin a moment to realize they were talking to him. “Orders?”

  Well, Bristel had been right about one thing. There was always a need to lift a weapon. “Neutralize,” he called back, and made himself watch as Osu was taken down with a blast straight through the chest.

  There were two bodies to be disposed of now, and Sabin supposed it was time to up the body count for the day from seven to nine. No one spoke, just stared down at the bodies of the two men they’d probably known since they were children. Sabin himself had grown up with both of them. He’d wrestled and learned with them and they’d fought side by side more times than not.

  And now they were gone.

  He looked around, hunting for any trace of the aggressors in this. If they were watching, taking some kind of sick pleasure in seeing them fall and kill each other like animals, then they were well hidden. Sabin couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary, and he wondered if they had bodies at all.

  Maybe they were just spirits. Maybe they possessed people and drove them to madness and then fled when their work was done. Maybe they could shape shift and one of the guards assembled at the gate was really one of the Nine. Maybe he would be the next one to fall victim to their plot, either by getting sick or losing his mind or having to be the one to kill someone else.

  The thought of either of those things made his stomach churn, but he took a deep breath and then regretted it when the smell of charred, cauterized flesh wafted towards him by the sudden wind.

  Everyone was still on high alert, and they were all looking to him for answers.

  How he wished he had some for them.

  “You know what to do with the bodies,” he said. There was an incinerator at the edge of town, used for just this purpose. It had been working overtime since the Nine had arrived. But they had never believed in letting the dead hang around, and they believed in it even less now when the stakes were so high.

  Sabin bowed his head as the bodies were carted away. “Creators, guide their journey,” he murmured. “And send them to the stars where they await their eternal rest.” It was a common prayer, said whenever someone fell.

  They’d been saying it more than ever now.

  “Sir?” someone asked from behind him. Sabin turned and saw one of the recruits. Fresh faced and young, he couldn’t have been that much younger than Sabin. Judging by his uniform, he was two years into the three process of training.

  “Yes?” he replied, not even bothering to keep the weariness from his voice.

  “I just… How much longer can this go on?”

  “As long as it can, I suppose,” Sabin answered, hon
estly. “Until we don’t have anything left for them to take from us.” That wasn’t any comfort, he knew that. But it was the best answer he had. “Excuse me,” he said, and stepped away.

  He really should have gone to watch the incineration, but he was suddenly more tired than he wanted to think about, and a spike of worry lanced his gut.

  The Samis Das had faced many enemies before, but there were no enemies like the Nine. Never had anyone defeated them, and he didn’t really think this would be the first time it happened.

  When he made it back, Lilera was waiting for him. She had a pinched look on her face, and Sabin hated himself for hesitating a bit, hand still on the hilt of his sword.

  But then she looked up and saw him and relief turned her face into the pretty thing he was used to seeing. He relaxed.

  “Sabin! Thank goodness. Someone said there was a commotion down at the gate and someone had gotten killed, and I…”

  He smiled at her, and knew it wasn’t anywhere close to being reassuring. “I’m fine,” he said. “Got into another argument with Bristel, and then…” He looked away. “Osu had the madness and he shot him clean through the head.”

  Her eyes went wide. “Bristel shot Osu?”

  Sabin swallowed and shook his head. “No. Other way around.”

  “Other way…” She gasped when she got it, one hand flying up over her mouth. “Bristel is…”

  Sabin nodded. “And Osu had to be neutralized. I gave the order.”

  “How long can this go on?” she asked, in an echo of the young man who’d asked him almost exactly the same thing. He didn’t feel the need to be reassuring with her.

  As much as he wanted to reassure her, Sabin knew that Lilera understood how serious this was. She’d understood it from the moment she’d had to kill her own father to save her life.

  “I don’t know, Lilera,” he said. “We need to think of something. We’re just sitting here, fighting with each other while they pick us off! There has to be something.” His voice broke and his head was pounding with the stress he was feeling. More than anything he just wanted to sleep, but who knew what he’d wake up to.

  “Spend the night with me,” Lilera said suddenly, and Sabin’s head jerked up.

  “What?”

  “Spend the night with me,” she repeated. “I don’t think either of us should be alone with this tonight.”

  It was a tempting offer, and he accepted it. It would probably do him wonders to forget about the horrors of the bodies he’d seen in the pleasures of Lilera’s body.

  Chapter 2: Part of the Job

  Bodies were something you just learned how to deal with when you worked in the medical field. You had to see them in various states of undress and health, had to bathe them and heal them and touch them, and eventually it just lost some of the awkwardness that usually went along with that kind of thing.

  When you saw these bodies covered in blood and crying and broken, you stopped thinking of the awkwardness and how it affected you and just got down to helping them.

  That was just how it worked in this field.

  “We’ve got three adult males in critical condition. I need Sutter, Carlos, and Raimes with me,” Dr. Cooper said as he walked quickly into the emergency room. The nurses he’d called for hurried to follow. When something like this happened, it was an all hands on deck situation, and there wasn’t time for hesitation or being slow.

  Together the three nurses got the men hooked up to IVs and started cutting away their clothes, finding broken bones and gashes, glass and metal lodged in places where neither glass nor metal were ever supposed to go.

  Two of the men were unconscious, and the one Heather Sutter was working on was breathing wetly. She touched around his chest area and then down, and when he gave a cry, she made a face. “Broken collarbone, probably at least two fractured ribs,” she called out.

  Dr. Cooper nodded. “We’ll need an x-ray to be sure. Let’s get them stabilized.”

  It was hard work, and Heather lost count of the number of times she had to change her gloves out for fresh ones that weren’t soaked in blood. But she had the routine down by now. She’d been doing this for enough years that it was second nature for her, hands moving, voice murmuring soothing words to the patient who was awake, moving quickly and carefully to get them stable so they could be moved on to the next stage of their care.

  Nurses were the backbone of any good hospital, and she was good at her job, working hard and with skill until she was ready to move on to the next thing.

  When the three beds were wheeled out to go to the x-ray machine, Heather let out a messy breath and wiped her forehead. She redid her ponytail to keep her auburn hair out of her face while Dr. Cooper talked to Nurse Raimes and then she smiled when he made his way over to her. “Excellent job in there, Nurse Sutter,” he said. “Your work is excellent, as always.”

  Heather smiled. “Thank you, Dr. Cooper. I try.”

  “I’m always impressed with your bedside manner whenever I get a chance to observe you. Today was no exception.”

  There was something about praise that made doing a hard job seem easier, more worth it somehow, and hearing one of the best doctors in Parker Memorial Hospital thought that her work was good was as good as her getting her second wind.

  Of course that moment was short lived because no sooner had she opened her mouth to thank him than someone was rushing a bed through the halls, calling out “Seven year old boy having trouble breathing. I need a nurse in here stat!”

  “Looks like you’re up,” Dr. Cooper said, and he gestured for her to go ahead.

  Heather Sutter had become a nurse because she was dedicated to helping people. When she was twenty one, her father lost his battle with cancer, and there hadn’t been anything she could do to help him, and it had just made her more determined to do her job well. She’d been new to nursing then, fresh out of school and looking for a place to work. There hadn’t been anything she could do for her father, other than make him more comfortable and watch as he got sicker and sicker, and that helplessness had driven her to throw herself into her work.

  She was one of those nurses who went the extra mile for the patients she was assigned to work with. Heather was kind to them and could often be found in their rooms chatting with them while she fixed their IVs or took their vitals.

  The doctors often commented that she was an asset to the hospital, and some of the other nurses thought she was a suck up, but it didn’t have anything to do with wanting recognition or praise. More than anything Heather just wanted to help people. If there was something she could do to make them more comfortable or less scared, then she was going to do it.

  Her father had always believed in wishing and magic and things that couldn’t be seen, and in the end, none of that had saved him. He’d died just like anyone else who didn’t believe, and Heather, who had wanted to believe there was something to her dad’s fanciful stories, was left with her grief and no amount of wishing on stars could make that better.

  So she’d gone back to what she knew would work. Rolling up her sleeves and putting on her gloves and doing everything she could to assist the people who were in the business of saving lives.

  When she entered the room the little boy had been admitted to, she found him there alone, eyes wide as he fought to take slow, deep breaths.

  “Hi,” Heather said. “What’s your name?”

  He still looked terrified, and she could tell he’d been crying, but that wasn’t going to help him with his issues breathing, so she was going to have to keep him distracted. Idly, she wondered where his parents were.

  “J-jamie,” the boy stammered, and he started heaving a bit as he fought to breathe.

  Heather walked over and rested a gentle hand against his shoulder, making sure to smile at him. “Hi, Jamie. I’m Heather. I’m going to be looking after you until someone can come have a look, okay?”

  Jamie nodded, lower lip trembling some as he took another breath. “Am I gonna d
ie?” he whispered, and Heather’s heart broke for him.

  In her line of work, she knew it was important to never give false hope. That was one of the two main rules that they had to adhere to. Never give false hope and never admit that a failed treatment was your fault. Of course that was more about keeping them in the clear for lawsuits and not helping the patients, but Heather knew she was as bound to follow the rules as anyone else.

  “Don’t think about that,” she said gently. “The doctors are gonna do everything they can, okay? I’m just here to make sure you’re ready when they come in so they can get right to helping you.” She hesitated for a moment because this could often be a tricky question, but she needed to know. “Did someone call your parents? Who brought you in?”

  “My teacher, Mrs. Logan,” Jamie replied. “She said she was gonna call my daddy.”

  Heather nodded. “Okay, that’s good. That’s good that your dad’s gonna come. I need you to hold real still for me, okay, Jamie? This might hurt a bit, but I need to make sure you’re hooked up to this bag, okay?”

  And it went from there, Heather asking questions to keep him distracted and giving him gentle explanations for what she was doing. Soon enough the doctor’s and the boy’s dad showed up and she was ushered out to go deal with the next crisis.

  Another hour went by before she was released for a break and to do more rounds, and she decided that coffee took precedence at the moment. If any patients were in desperate need of help, someone would have called for her, and since she made it all the way down to the cafeteria without being stopped, she was going to assume that it was fine.

  Hospital coffee wasn’t even really worthy of being called coffee in her book. It was more like dark brown hot water with no flavor to it, and she thought it was something of a crime for them to serve that swill in a place where people had to work twelve to fourteen hour shifts regularly.

  She wove her way through doctors and interns alike until she saw her friend Keith sitting at one of the few tables that weren’t cluttered with people. With a relieved and grateful sigh, she dropped into a chair and put her feet up in the one across from her.