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

by Lisa Lace

  Dreams didn’t always have to mean something, she knew that, but this was just so vivid.

  Heather sighed and folded her arms behind her head, staring up at the sky. It was a clear night, not a cloud in the sky, perfect for stargazing.

  She could still pinpoint the brightest stars, still find the beginning of constellations and follow them through their patterns, the shapes coming into focus right before her eyes as she looked. She hadn’t done this since the night when she’d begged whoever was listening to spare her dad’s life, but it was almost therapeutic now.

  As she watched, something in the distance flared with light, and Heather sat up a bit, squinting. She’d kept her dad’s telescope, and she wished now that she would have thought to bring it with her so she could see better. It seemed too big to be a star and it wasn’t moving very fast, but it burned bright.

  A comet maybe? Heather didn’t think so, but she couldn’t come up with any other explanation. As she watched it got brighter and closer and then arched across the sky, leaving a trail of fiery light in its wake.

  Almost involuntarily, her eyes closed and she made a wish. “Please let me stop feeling so...empty. I just. I wish there was something more in my life.” She whispered it, and when she opened her eyes, it was to see the tail end of the bright trail fading away as the star moved behind the trees.

  She heaved a sigh and then jumped when she heard something moving in the trees.

  “Who’s there?” someone called, and she scrambled down from her car, fishing her keys out of her pocket and clenching them tightly in her fist. This was not how she wanted to die, murdered by some crazy in the middle of nowhere. “Darned kids always coming around.”

  An older man stepped out of the trees, and there was enough light from the moon for Heather to see that he had what looked like a rifle in his hands.

  “Who’re you?” he asked, and Heather held her hands up in a placating gesture. “This is private property, girl.”

  “Sorry,” Heather said quickly. “I was just leaving.”

  “Good,” the man replied, and he watched her as she got back in her car and cranked it up, not moving from his spot until she had pulled back onto the road.

  “Weirdo,” Heather muttered under her breath as she drove away. It was closing in on four in the morning, and she didn’t have to work until the next night, so she wouldn’t immediately regret her lack of sleep. Even now she was too keyed up to consider going back to her apartment and getting in bed, so she did the next best thing and drove to her favorite place.

  Mandy’s Market was about as far from an actual market as something could get. Instead of what people assumed it was, some kind of grocery store, it was a hole in the wall diner.

  When Heather had first moved here and taken the job at the hospital four years ago, this had been the place where her car had overheated, leaving her stranded for an hour before AAA had shown up.

  When she’d gone inside, it was to find the best coffee she’d ever tasted as well as the biggest burgers, the crispiest fries, and the thickest milkshakes. Whenever she had a bad day, she came to Mandy’s, and seeing as it was open twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty five days a year, there was never a time when it wasn’t there for her.

  She was a regular at this point, and it wasn’t odd at all for her to show up at four in the morning since she worked in a hospital. Usually she was still in her scrubs when she staggered in for what either counted as an early breakfast or a really late dinner, and people looked at her when she walked in dressed in her regular clothes.

  No one knew who ‘Mandy’ was, since the head chef and owner was a portly woman named Diana, but people called her Mandy anyway. Heather knew that the way to get free coffee and free refills of fries was to call her by her actual name, though, and she smiled at Diana as she dropped into a stool at the counter.

  “Late night, honey?” Diana asked, sliding a cup in front of her and filling it up with rich, dark coffee that smelled heavenly.

  The rest of the diner smelled like fried food and pie, and it was mostly empty at this time of night, a few students scattered around tables in the back and a man who looked like a trucker was sitting a few stools down from her at the other end of the counter.

  It was an old place, with worn tiles and cracked red leather booths, but that only added to its charm. Plus, no matter how old it was, Diana kept it clean. The floor was spotless and shiny, and she liked to say that you could eat off the floor just as well as the counters because of how clean they were.

  No one ever tried it, but all the patrons were happy with the way Mandy’s was run.

  Soft music piped in from the speakers above the counter, and it was cozy and warm in the diner, as it always was. Immediately some of the tension started to bleed from her shoulders.

  Heather reached for the sugar and the little things of cream and sighed. “Something like that. What about you, Di? You don’t usually work this late.”

  “My son’s in the hospital,” she replied. “Better to be here than worrying about him, you know? You know what you wanna eat, honey?”

  “Oh no, I’m so sorry to hear that,” Heather said. “Is he at Parker Memorial?”

  Diana nodded. “Of course. Being looked after by a Dr. Hampstead.”

  “Hampstead’s really good,” Heather assured her. “He’ll look after him. Can I get fries and a piece of peanut butter pie?”

  “One of those kinda nights?” Diana asked in response, scribbling down the order and pushing it through the window to the kitchen.

  “Yeah. Weird dream and then I nearly got chased out of a field by a weirdo with a gun.”

  Diana made a face, leaning on the counter. “What on Earth were you doing in a field at four in the morning, Heather?”

  Heather shrugged. “Stargazing? Trying to shake off the last bits of that dream? Something like that. There was a weird light in the sky and then this man came out of the trees telling me I was on private property.”

  “You saw that, too?”

  Diana and Heather both turned their heads to look at the trucker at the other end of the counter. He was looking back at them with wide eyes, hat pulled low on his head. He needed a shave and probably a shower, and he looked shaken.

  “Yeah,” Heather said slowly. “It was just like a comet or something, right? A really big shooting star?”

  The man shook his head. “Ain’t never seen no kinda star that big,” he said. “That close. Anything else woulda burned up in the atmosphere and that thing was whole.”

  “So what do you think it was, then?” Heather wanted to know.

  “UFO,” he replied. “We’re about to be visited.”

  Diana snorted. “If I had a dime for every time someone came in here claiming to have seen some kinda alien,” she said. “I’d have enough money to close this place down and not have to worry about my bills anymore, I’ll tell you that.”

  That kind of thing was easy to ignore, to dismiss, but Heather recognized the look on the man’s face. It was the same look her dad used to get when he talked about wishes and how the stars had changed his life for the better. That look of utter assurance that he was right about this.

  “Y’don’t have to believe me,” the man said. “But when weird stuff starts happening, you’ll see.”

  “Visited by what, though?” Heather found herself asking, her coffee still untouched in front of her.

  The man shrugged a shoulder. “Can’t say for sure. Space is big as heck. Ain’t no telling what’s out there. I’ll tell ya this, though.” He looked her right in the eye. “Ain’t no way everything out there is friendly. And they probably got stuff we ain’t even dreamed about yet. You’ll see.”

  “If you’re gonna scare my customers away, then you can leave,” Diana said, putting Heather’s food in front of her. “I won’t have you in here being bad for business.”

  He raised his hands in a gesture of peace and went back to his coffee. Diana started wi
ping down the counter, and Heather picked at her food, not sure why she couldn’t shake the thought that something big was about to happen.

  Aside from the death of her father, nothing big ever happened to her, and she’d be perfectly fine if nothing that big ever happened again, thanks very much. Still, it was hard to believe that weird lights in the sky and this man talking about “visitors” from outer space on the same night she’d had a dream about her dad pointing to the sky was just a coincidence.

  Her dad had always believed there was more out there than humans knew. He’d tell her that space was so big and so vast that it would be a ridiculous waste if they were the only ones alive in the whole universe.

  “There are probably things out there so powerful and old that they don’t even waste their time with us,” he’d say, eyes bright, like talking about powerful creatures that could destroy them was just as exciting as talking about whether or not his football team was going to do well that year.

  Heather had never put much stock in it, really. If there was something else out there, then it could stay out there as far as she was concerned. But with this sighting she’d had, there was a squirming in her stomach, and she didn’t want to think about it, but it was hard to believe that the man didn’t have a point.

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost, honey,” Diana said as she came by with the coffee pot to refill her cup. “Don’t pay that man no mind. People always love to get other people riled up.”

  “Yeah,” Heather said, nodding and forcing herself to eat. “Yeah, of course.” If only it were that easy to believe.

  Chapter 5: Kept

  “If it were only that easy,” Vieryn murmurs, her fingers carding through her son’s hair while he sleeps with his head on her lap.

  “It is that easy, Vieryn. You just put it behind you.”

  Her husband is a bold man. A brave man, but he doesn’t understand.

  Somehow, Sabin knows this. He’s both asleep on his mother’s lap and standing in front of her, watching something that supposedly already happened in his life. He doesn’t remember this, but he has a good idea of what they’re talking about.

  “You don’t want Sabin growing up to be afraid.”

  She purses her lips together and looks away. “There are some things that you would be stupid not to fear.”

  “Fear is a weakness.”

  “Except for when it’s a strength.”

  In this place, this dream, Sabin doesn’t remember that his mother is dead. He doesn’t recall that he saw her body lying limp and grey in her house. All he knows is that she looks tired, and as much as he’s always looked up to his father, he wants to tell him to be quiet and leave this alone.

  “You want him to walk around afraid of something that might never happen?”

  Vieryn sighs and looks away. “You never know what might happen.” She stills her hand on top of little Sabin’s head and pulls him closer, as if she means to protect him from anything that might be coming after him.

  Grown up Sabin wants to tell her that it’s him who fails her in the end, but he doesn’t have the words or the memories and he just ends up confused. His head hurts. His heart hurts. He doesn’t think he wants to wake up.

  The dream fades anyway.

  When Sabin opened his eyes, he was aware of a wash of blue and nothing else. His head was foggy and he couldn’t remember anything. He laid still for a long moment, trying to force himself to think. If he had been hurt in some kind of training exercises or battle then moving too much would only make things worse. And if he had been in battle, then he might have been captured by the enemy. He needed to find out as much information as he could before he moved and alerted them to the fact that he was awake.

  After all, there had to be a reason he wasn’t dead yet.

  It was basic instinct to run down these thoughts when you first woke up when you’d spent basically your whole life training as a warrior. It was only once the events of the last few days started to trickle back into his mind that he realized that he probably had been captured and the cold horror overtook the rational planning he’d been doing just seconds before.

  Lilera.

  His mil’kra.

  Countless others, he was sure.

  All dead.

  He’d taken an oath when he’d taken up the mantle of a guard and another when he’d been made captain, promising to keep people safe. To lay down his life if need be to make sure that his people survived. And now he was alive (at least he thought he was), and everyone else that he loved was gone.

  Pain, aching and stabbing and sharp, ripped through him, but he knew it wasn’t from a wound. It was the stinging pain of loss and defeat, and he gritted his teeth to keep himself from giving into it.

  First things first. He had to figure out where in the void he was and what was going on.

  The pulsing blue light made him wonder if maybe he really was dead, and there was mild comfort that came with the thought. But then his eyes focused and he could tell that this wasn’t the light of the stars, but of an energy field. The light humming sound and the warmth under him gave it away.

  He seemed to be floating in the middle of a dark expanse, but when he squinted, trying to make out anything to let him know where he was, the dim light from the energy field that shone outside of it lit up the carvings on the wall.

  The ruins! They hadn’t taken him anywhere yet, then. Just contained him.

  ...which was odd. Why hadn’t they just killed him? They killed Lilera with ease and obviously hadn’t had any qualms about taking out a huge number of the Samis Das by essentially making them take each other out.

  So why was he still alive?

  There’d be time to ponder that later, hopefully. Unfortunately, with it being as dark in the ruins as it was, there was no way to know if he was alone or not. The Nine were way too skilled at hiding in the shadows and lying in wait, but he didn’t see the ominous gleam of red eyes anywhere, so he was going to try something. If he was caught and killed, then…

  Well. At least he’d go to the stars where Lilera and his parents waited for him. Hopefully they wouldn’t be too upset with him for failing to protect anyone.

  No time to dwell on that, though. A careful inspection proved that they’d taken his weapons from him, and Sabin made a face. He was a force to be reckoned with even without sword and blaster, since he was so large, but breaking out of energy fields was much easier when you had tools.

  Sabin looked at his hands and shrugged. They’d have to do. He balled them into fists and got as close to the curved surface of the energy field as he dared. In one fluid motion, he raised his hands up and then slammed them down, hoping to disrupt the field enough that he could break through.

  What he got was a nasty shock that sent him reeling back and made his arms go numb from his hands up to his elbows.

  That wasn’t going to work, clearly.

  There had to be some way to get out of here and....and then what? Where was he supposed to go? Anyone who could help him was probably dead or on their way to being dead, and for all he knew, he was the only one still alive. The Nine had been among his people for a long time now, feasting on their fear and anguish, and it was probably time for them to move on.

  If he could get to a ship then he could maybe get off this miserable planet and go somewhere else, but he’d be alone. That had never been the way he wanted this to go, but he didn’t think he had any other choice at this point.

  He just had to get out of this field first.

  Sabin cast his eye around for anything that would help him break free, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw the flickering shadows in the entrance to the ruins. It might have been nothing, or it might have been a sign that the Nine were coming back. Either way, he wasn’t taking any chances.

  He dropped back down to the bottom of the field, willing his heart rate to slow and his fear not to give him away as he licked his lips and pretended to be still out cold.

  You got much
more information when the enemy thought you weren’t a threat, Sabin knew that, and there was nothing more non-threatening than someone who was unconscious.

  “I am tired,” hissed one of the Nine as they swept into the cavern, and Sabin could smell their horrible scent even through the energy field. “This planet has grown dull.”

  Sabin realized with a start that he could understand them and thanked the Creators for the gift of tongues they’d seen fit to give his people. Strength and communication had always been the virtues of the Samis Das, and Sabin figured he’d just been too rattled to understand the Nine before. Maybe they would disclose their plans and give him somewhere to start with his own.

  “This planet is an endless feast,” one of the others replied. “So much fear. So much to glut ourselves on.”

  Sabin kept his eyes closed as they moved past the field, and he wondered if they really were a horde. Clearly they weren’t a hive mind, since there were differing opinions, but did all nine of them move together all the time? Because that would make them both harder and easier to beat. Easier because once he’d wiped them all out, he wouldn’t have to worry about there being more of them, and harder because he didn’t like the odds of nine against one.

  “I am tired of the same meal.”

  He couldn’t tell if that was the same one from before or a different one. All of their voices sounded the same from what he could tell, high and slithery, and he didn’t know how they were talking anyway, since none of them seemed to have mouths.

  “A meal is a meal,” pointed out one of them.

  There was a burst of hissing that sounded like the rabble of an argument and moved too quickly for Sabin to keep up with. He took a chance and let one of his eyes open just a fraction so he could see, and saw that the Nine were standing in a huddle, the undulating shadows moving around them.

  “Earth,” someone said. “We will go to Earth. The food there will be plentiful. So much fear. So much confusion.”