by Naomi Lucas
Her nose wrinkled when they entered the medlab where she stripped to her panties and crawled into a surgical pod.
Stryker stood by her side as she typed in the procedures that needed to be done and before long she had several IV’s attached to her arm as her body was soaked head to toe in medical sprays that leveled out her vitamin deficiencies and killed any external bacteria or parasites that she might have picked up.
He then pricked her arm and took some of her blood and shot it into himself, again.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that.” So, so wrong.
His eyes went unfocused, staring through her and not at her as he did whatever it was he did with her blood.
“I want to make sure,” he blinked and was back in his own head. “If my nanocells encounter anything peculiar, I can run my own diagnostics on it. Cyborgs can’t get sick,” he finished.
Stryker stayed by her side, a hairsbreadth away until the medical examinations finished. Norah didn’t feel any relief when she looked over the reports and saw that she wasn’t sick or infected. Her health was just one more potential impediment to survival.
And with the Cyborg at her side, she felt invincible. She could overcome anything with him beside her.
When she climbed up off the table and back into Stryker’s embrace, it occurred to her that this was the first time in over a week that she had been fully dry. Naked but dry. It was heavenly.
Norah rubbed her hands over her sides, along her chest, and through her hair, absorbing the wonderful smoothness of her skin despite the scratches, bruises, and aches she endured. Just being dry made her want to dance with joy.
“Want to wash up?” Stryker watched her with blue flames in his eyes. She followed him out of the cold room, pulling a lab coat over herself.
“Over my dead body. I’m finally dry, I want to enjoy it for a little while.”
He laughed. “Even If I were to wash you?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Even so.”
Stryker leaned down and settled his forehead over hers. “I would kiss you if I could.”
“You are.” Norah smiled and pushed her temple against his. “These are our kisses.”
She didn’t think he could be any more attractive than he already was but when his eyes went molten and his body puffed out against hers, his heat threatening to burn her up, he destroyed the rest of her reserve and if he asked her, she would follow him into the stars.
The moment was lost when he lifted his head and stilled. She took a step back and eyed the strange mechanical mannerisms of her Cyborg.
“Message update, the city responded. I need to go back to the bridge,” he said, hard and artificial. Stryker had so many facets that she couldn’t keep up with him.
How could he ever choose me? The door to the medical bay closed behind her. I don’t want to let him go.
Norah pushed the self-pitying thoughts to the back of her mind.
“The city that doesn’t exist,” she quipped as she followed him back to the bridge. She continued to rub the softness of her skin where it itched from the healing serum’s effects. It was much slower than Stryker’s ability to heal but was still fast enough to see a difference within a day.
“Officially.” He sat down in the captain’s chair and went still.
Norah walked back to the window and looked out over the storm far below on the planet’s surface. She didn’t think it was her imagination, but it looked like it had gotten worse.
The storm’s eye stared back at her, taunting her to come back to the surface and avenge her teammates. The black and purple mass swirled over half the planet and as she stared back at it, more eyes appeared and the miasma blinked with white electricity.
The longer she watched it, the more she began to relate to it, to see herself in it. Maybe she should go back down? Maybe it was her destiny to be amongst the rage that had surfaced out of nowhere and killed her teammates? It felt wrong to her, frightening, but at the same time, there was a rightness to it.
But their research remained. Norah looked around the bridge before returning her gaze to Axone’s storm. I need to contact EonMed, she thought. Maybe something good can come out of this.
She pressed her head against the reinforced glass and felt the pull of the tempest below her. The image of Robert’s body suit came to mind, the skin weak and sagging against a creature that didn’t belong underneath it.
Norah clenched her hands.
“We have a problem, babe.”
Her tie to the sky was broken. She turned her back on Axone and looked at Stryker. When don’t we have a problem?
“What is it?”
“My IP signature was recently used within my ship but my ship never made it to Ghost.” Stryker eyed her as if he knew the war that raged within her.
Norah felt her fingernails break the skin of her palm. “And?”
“And that means we need to make a detour because the city won’t give me coordinates. I’m already late for my appointments.” Stryker looked away from her before he found her eyes again. “What do you want to do?” he asked. “What do you need?”
The blood pooled under the broken chips of her nails. “Why are you asking me?”
“Because your opinion is the most important.” His brow furrowed and he came to her, lifting her fists before his face until she released the nails from her skin. “Because you need control back in your life.”
A forked tongue slithered out from the bottom of Stryker’s mask and lapped at the drips of blood on her hand before it slithered up her fingers and over her nails.
“Gross,” she choked.
He laughed and his tongue vanished behind the metal on his face. “I know.”
Norah wiped her hands on the medical lab coat and looked back at the clouds. Everything in her wanted to go back into the storm but reason beat out her emotional stupidity. Stryker’s hands gripped her hips and pulled her against him.
They both had a job to do and it was up to Stryker and her to return to those that they worked for.
“Let’s go find your ship.”
Chapter Seventeen:
***
Stryker checked the anonymous missive sent from Ghost several times over. It wasn’t because he didn’t know what it meant, it was because he just wanted to get on with his job.
Now that he was off the swamp planet with Norah alive and breathing by his side, the preservation of his pristine record returned to the top of his priority list.
When he had Matt within his sight he was going to throttle the alcoholic and drop him off at the next port. If his record was broken because of him the pain he would inflict would indescribable.
He wasn’t about to go down in EPED’s records as the Cyborg that got bested by a drunk. The chance of that even happening was enough to bring out the viper under his skin.
Stryker looked up at Norah and felt his rage diminish. His tongue dipped from his mouth and he let loose a low hiss behind his mask. It had taken everything in him to not claim her in the medlab when she had stripped off her damp clothes and revealed her shades of mahogany and cinnamon.
Now that the murk of Axone was behind them, and a calm had snuck its way back into their lives, he could finally scent Norah’s true smell. Every breath he inhaled and released, even though it was behind his mask, her perfume invaded his senses.
A perfect blend of vanilla and clove with the infused odor of medical serum. It smelled clean, pristine, and dangerous. Stryker sucked in another breath of air. She smells healthy and safe.
She’s finally safe.
He glanced at her as he ran scans and sent a message to his ship. If it connected, he would have its coordinates, unlike Ghost’s, where everything was channeled through a super server that the captain of the city cycled on a daily basis. And that didn’t include the impenetrable shields.
Norah’s hair had sprung up around her head, an explosion of slick curls that tempted his fingers. She stared at the stars outside the bridge’s window, her
eyes hooded and vacant. It made him want to wrap her up within his embrace and bring life back to her gaze.
The flutter of her heart stopped him. It had yet to settle within her chest.
Humans are so strange.
Stryker disconnected from the signals he had weeded out around them and put all his attention on his scientist. “Are you okay?” he asked.
She didn’t look back at him but answered anyway, “I don’t know. I think I might be in shock, but that doesn’t make sense does it?” The EonMed ship picked up his own ship’s signal but he ignored it. “I have this overwhelming need to go back, I feel like screaming, and yet at the same time I’m terrified.” Her eyes widened and glazed as she continued speaking. “I don’t understand what’s happening inside of me and I–I feel so torn. I feel so much and yet I feel numb. I can’t stop asking ‘Why’? Why did those creatures attack us? What happened during those last few moments that changed everything? Why did I survive and no one else did? I don’t understand it and that makes me uncomfortable.” Stryker had never heard her ramble before.
“It’s the scientist in you that’s talking. Look,” he reconnected to the ship and uploaded the images he had taken of the creatures in a visual feed before them. Each image lined up and enlarged and made him feel like he had never left them behind. “What do you see?”
The glare of her blank stare vanished as she broke out of her hypnosis and looked at the pictures.
“I see the very thing that I want to eradicate from all existence,” Norah muttered. “The creatures that ruined everything.”
Stryker canted his head, “That’s how I feel when I look at the aliens, the Trentians.”
“How do you stop yourself from acting on your impulses?”
“I do my best to bury that need inside me. Deep. I remind myself that I rule my own wants and needs and not the programs and DNA inside me. It’s...” he hissed through his teeth, low and deep, “It’s why I’m so focused on perfection. If I wasn’t, why would I want to continue living? Everything about me is wrong, I was created for a war that ended. I’m outdated. Someday I’ll be primitive.” He reached his hand out and took hers. “It’s why I work for the EPED and try to use my skills elsewhere because...we may never war with the aliens again. Everything, eventually, changes.”
He smelled the tears budding in her eyes before they formed and caught in her lashes.
“What’re you saying?”
“I’m saying that there are some things you can’t change yourself and you just have to live with them. If you commit genocide on the ghouls that attacked your comrades, it won’t bring them back to life any more than I can change the reason for my existence.”
Norah hiccupped. “I know. I think I understand, but it doesn’t change anything.” She hung her head, letting her curls fall over her face. “I still want to go back down there.”
“I still want to kill the Trentians.”
“But you stop yourself…”
“I stop myself because if I did kill them all, there would be none left and that, Norah, I don’t think I can recover from.”
She squeezed his hand and they gave the horror of their thoughts a moment of silence. When he didn’t smell the salt of her tears anymore, he turned back to the notifications that flashed over the control screen.
His ship had never left the airspace of Axone. Stryker sighed.
Of all the crew that left, Matt had to stay. The thought didn’t stop him from feeling that something was wrong. Matt could be in danger, or dead, and those thoughts made him worried. He actually cared for the guy. To find him in a drunken stupor would be a relief at this point.
“Have you ever seen an alien beast like–like those?” Norah asked, her hand waved over the images. Stryker felt another mission, another goal come to the surface of his being. Matt and his ship. An easy tally for him.
He swung the ship around and piloted to his own ship’s spot. Axone and its hellscape blurred beneath them as he shot the EonMed vessel toward his. A swirl and line of color flooded his vision and was at its position within a matter of minutes.
“I’ve seen worse.” He docked the med ship up with his and sent out a call to Matt. He was close enough to connect to his vessel and control it from afar but found a chorus of errors when he tried. System malfunctions, overheating, program errors. It was far worse than he’d expected and far beyond anything his crewmate could have done to the ship.
He jerked his head and snapped at the space before him. He snapped his fangs to the nothing at his side. His tongue split in half and forked again. His snake couldn’t be controlled. The metal bands in his stomach ground against each other while he played out every outcome in his head.
Stryker reined his beast back in and continued, “I’ve seen creatures that could block out the sun, and things that fed off of the metal bullets that I shot into their bodies. I’ve seen humans, or what could have been humans, on faraway planets that had never evolved into sapient beings. The EPED has classified records of creations–structures not done by human or Trentian hands but by an unknown hand we have yet to find. Ancient civilizations and entire worlds, flush with plants and animals, with nothing and no one left but old structures. Things that you would think impossible. Gods that you wouldn’t even want to know that had once existed.”
Norah stared at him wide-eyed as if he had just cracked open her head.
“Why do they keep it a secret?” she whispered.
Stryker shrugged. “It would flood the network channels. And your species’ attention would be waylaid by unimportant matters. It’s why they employ Cyborgs, amongst other things. We know how to keep secrets. And if we didn’t, the government might just think about reviving the Cyborg program and make more.” He unstrapped his buckles and stood up, feeling a foreboding sense of unease pass through him. He didn’t like it. But he didn’t like most things.
“And the things on Axone? What do you make of them? Are they just another creature in your bestiary or are they something else?” Norah released herself from the chair and stood up with him. “They followed us, they came after us. They knew how to track us. If that isn’t crazy, what is?”
Before he knew what he was saying, it fell off the tip of his tongue. “You should become a Monster Hunter, babe.” Stryker closed his eyes as the words left him and the jerk of the EonMed vessel latched onto his.
He hated when anything touched his ship. He couldn’t keep the exterior pristine when he was traveling through space. The idea of a scratch could haunt him for an entire mission.
Norah hiccupped then laughed, “I’m not a hunter nor am I a survivalist. I’ll never be qualified for your job–”
Stryker interrupted her, “Where is your arsenal?”
“Across from the medbay. Why?” she asked as she followed him out of the bridge. He followed her directions. The door of the weapons unit opened up for him and he stepped through.
“Never enter an unknown situation without a means to protect yourself.” He eyed the supplies that were given to the EonMed scientists with disdain. Nothing here for soldiers. He picked his way through a series of pistols and electric tasers to add to his space suit. Nothing here for a Cyborg.
Stryker weaved himself into shoulder straps that had gun clips attached and a belt that was a little too tight for his frame. He looked stupid with everything cinched around his body.
Norah put on her own belt and clipped in a new gun. It wasn’t much, but it was something.
“You’re avoiding my question, Stryker,” she barred his exit, standing in the center of the doorway. “What do you think of those creatures back there? I won’t stop asking.”
He slid his hands up the frame of the doorway above her head and leaned into her. To his surprise, she didn’t back off or flinch from his nearness, from his invasion of her personal space.
“You care too much,” he looked down at her.
“I’ve never cared enough.”
He closed his eyes and breathed her s
cent in, sucking whatever he could from beneath the edges of his mask. When he reopened them, he was met with the stubborn woman who held her ground.
“You’re a chemist,” he said. “You took samples of the water, right?” When she nodded he continued. “Did you find or see anything unusual?”
Stryker watched as Norah looked away from him, her brow furrowed with thought and the tense muscles that were poised to block his exit loosen. Her lips pushed out into a pout that he wished he could kiss off of her face.
“All of it was usual,” she eventually replied. “Microorganisms and bacteria that we found native to the planet. Things we expected to find that we were able to confirm in the EonMed database and cross analyze with other organisms. It was all standard.”
“Did you or anyone else drink the water on Axone?”
“Everything was used, recycled, and purified from water sources on Earth, Kepler, and Gliese.” Norah gripped her stomach. “I ingested some when I nearly drowned during the crash.” Her eyes went wide with fear.
“Even the water left within the sprinkler system?”
“I–I don’t know. It never went off before then.”
Stryker dropped his arm and pulled her into him. “Norah, you’re fine. The meds I gave you could kill a roach. I checked your lab results just in case. The shriekers couldn’t leave the water for any length of time.”
“I realize that.”
“Ever hear of Cholera or Naegleria fowleri? They are all ancient water-borne microbes found on Earth before humans eradicated them.”
“I accounted for all the bacteria, Stryker, everything the other scientists and I did was within extra-planetary protocol. We grew the strains in petri dishes and ran a multitude of tests with lab-grown human skin, we tested it under dozens of variables. We had one of the best xeno-virology experts in the universe,” she argued. “We discovered several possible diseases but nothing, nothing that could or would explain what happened to Robert…”
Stryker ran his hands up her stiff back and cupped her face, peering down into her wide, unsettling eyes; dark orbs that could have been black holes for all he knew. “Imagine if some of those bacteria were human-sized,” he whispered. He didn’t want to scare her, but he had seen it before. He had seen so much in his travels. “You can’t account for human error.”
