The Cyborg Next Door

by Bianca D’Arc

  In The Stars Romance

  The Cyborg Next Door

  by

  Bianca D’Arc

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Copyright © 2019 Bianca D’Arc

  Published by Hawk Publishing, LLC

  All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  DEDICATION

  Many thanks to Yvette Nemec and the members of my fb fan group for helping me brainstorm the name of the station. You guys are great!

  And to my dear old Dad who was in and out of the hospital while this first part of this book was being written. He likes to keep me hopping and he definitely did quite a bit of it last year. Hopefully, Dad will soon be back to his old self and have a much easier year this year.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Epilogue

  Excerpt from Storm Bear

  About the Author

  Other Books by Bianca D’Arc

  PROLOGUE

  Aboard Eagle Nest Station

  Chiron didn’t like what he was seeing. He’d been scanning incoming news reports from all over the sector for the past few cycles, and signs indicated a slow but steady rise in military activity around all jump points, both major and minor. There were only certain places around the galaxy where wormholes could terminate, making the jump from one galaxy to another possible.

  There was an ongoing conflict with the jit’suku race, who came from a neighboring galaxy. Once they’d discovered they could infiltrate the Milky Way Galaxy through certain jump points, they’d done their best to come in and take over. Humanity had been fighting against them for years now, pushing back the alien invasion wherever it occurred.

  The jump points had been secured with giant lockable rings and massive weapons installations, as well as constant patrols. Any incursions through the jump points without prior authorization were dealt with severely.

  Chiron didn’t want more war. He particularly didn’t want it happening near or on the station on which he was currently serving.

  He was a cyborg. Although the military thought he was nothing but a robot with human parts, Chiron was a lot more than that. He was careful not to let it show, but he was aware and awake for the first time since he’d been made into a machine. If there was going to be fighting, he’d be among the first troops sent in to the hot zone, so he watched and waited, and talked with the others of his kind about the possibilities.

  The Jit’Suku Galaxy

  “They will be expecting us around the central jump points, and they’ve already proven able to defend those locations, but if we aim for the secondary jump points—the places farther away from their home planet and under less scrutiny—I believe we will be able to gain a strong foothold in their galaxy.”

  The jit’suku emperor listened to his generals discuss the new battle plan. This new plan was devious, but it just might work. All it needed was his permission to set things in motion.

  Did he want war with the humans? Not in particular, but he wanted access to the resources of that galaxy. He needed it to fuel his ever-expanding empire and it was ripe for the picking.

  Jit’suku were warriors. If the humans tried to deny them access to their galaxy, they would die. Simple as that.

  That thought firmly in mind, the emperor gave the nod.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Three Cycles Later - Aboard Eagle Nest Station

  The boy next door wasn’t a boy. He wasn’t even a man according to some, but Roxy had never felt that way about cyborgs. They’d been born human, but they’d been upgraded, for lack of a better word, for one reason or another. Some were accident victims, brought back to life—or some semblance thereof—by modern technology. Some were felons, forcibly modified by an unforgiving penal system. Most were soldiers who’d been used up too young and brought back with spare parts, their training and temperament too valuable to let die unremarked.

  Men with the necessary skills were too precious a commodity to let even one pass on to the next life before he’d served his time for the good of the human race. It was a harsh rule, but one that had been implemented early in humanity’s expansion into the galaxy because of what had been found just beyond the sol system.

  Aliens. And lots of them.

  An entire empire of humanoid beings who wanted to come in and take over now that the inhabitants of Earth had joined the rest of the alien races out among the stars. The jit’suku were devastatingly good fighters, and their technology was far ahead of Earth’s, but so far, humanity had been able to hold its own, keeping the conflict to the galactic rim, where a limited number of jump points allowed quick travel from one galaxy to another.

  Eagle Nest Station was positioned near one of the lesser jump point terminals—aptly called Jump Point Eagle—because this area had the best view of the famous Eagle Nebula and its Pillars of Creation. The risk of living and working on the station had been categorized as low in comparison to some of the other stations near jump points. Roxy wasn’t thrilled being so close to potential trouble, but she was down on her luck and had ended up here through no fault of her own.

  A ship’s engineer by trade, Roxy had signed on for a ten-year contract with Captain Jeffers, on his lightly crewed trader. When he’d put the moves on Roxy soon after departure from Earth, she’d literally had to fight the man off. She’d broken his arm, and things had gotten frosty really fast when they put in at a far-flung mining outpost.

  He’d left her in port without any of her gear. She’d only had the clothes on her back and the credit chip she’d been hiding on her person since the trouble with him began. She’d been half afraid he’d take his revenge at some point, so she’d been walking around armed and wearing as much of her stuff as she could reasonably get away with, but she’d lost a very expensive and top-of-the-line EVA suit along with most of her tools when Jeffers had sailed without her. The bastard.

  Roxy had been able to barter her skills for a place to sleep at the mining outpost. The people there were a little rough, but basically good folks, and they’d been glad of her assistance once they found out she was an experienced engineer. She’d spent a few months there, fixing every piece of machinery they had back to factory specs—or as close as she could get it with the materials at hand.

  When the next freighter had come through, she’d bartered for passage. Unfortunately, that ship had been headed to the Eagle jump point with a quick stop at Eagle Nest Station. Roxy had opted to get off at the station where she could try her luck getting passage back to Earth, or hooking up with a better ship and a new job. Better that than staying at the outpost for who knew how much longer hoping for a better ride.

  She’d arrived on Eagle Nest a
few weeks before with few credits to her name. She’d found work, of sorts, in the maintenance bay, doing odd jobs, but the station had a full complement of engineers, and Roxy was more of an expert in ships that went places, not so much with stations that stayed mostly in the same place all the time.

  Being frugal, she had secured lodgings in the low-rent part of the station, on one of the outermost rings, near a rumbly mech section. It was close to her work, since she was assigned to the maintenance area attached to that mech section, but most humans preferred to live on the inner rings where the food services and shopping concourses were.

  Roxy’s neighbors were mostly cyborgs. She didn’t mind that too much. She had an affinity for machines and as long as they kept to themselves and left her alone, she was cool. They were specialized versions of the gear she worked on every day, after all, and most humans believed nothing of the man remained after the cybertronic control systems were introduced into the brain stem during the cyborginazation process.

  Roxy hadn’t questioned what she’d been told outright—that the men who became cyborgs lost their humanity. To do so would have put her job in jeopardy. Besides, she didn’t have any contact with the man-machines in her routine work day. There was no reason for her to think too much about it, though she had always thought privately that cyborgs were people—or, at least, had been people—who deserved the same respect as any other being.

  Of course, she’d been accused of being naïve before. As far as the rest of humanity was concerned, cyborgs lost their citizenship and free will. They became classified along with other artificial intelligences, granted certain rights, but not the full rights they’d once had as human beings.

  Her next-door neighbor, though… He was a strange one. The more she saw of him, the more she began to doubt what she’d always heard about cyborgs.

  He didn’t say much. Didn’t socialize. But she saw him go out on patrol almost every night, doing his duty to guard the station and everyone on it. He also had a lot of visitors. Other cyborgs seemed to seek him out, as if he was some kind of counselor or elder statesman. When issues involving the cyborg corps on the station came up, it was often her neighbor’s face she saw in the news vids—never too prominent, but always there, speaking with management or listening to what was being said or decided about him and his brethren.

  Something was fishy with the cyborg next door, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

  Chiron retreated to his apartment and plugged in for a quick recharge. He didn’t really need the boost, but the station monitors expected it, so he did it. He tried always to do the expected thing, so his human overseers wouldn’t realize he’d regained consciousness.

  It sucked that they treated him and the others like they were dumb machines. For the most part, the biological part of the brain was subsumed by the Cybertronic Control System or CCS, as it was called, but the human brain was a fascinating thing, and over the years, it seemed, his had rerouted itself around the CCS to reintegrate parts of the man he’d been before the last firefight that had led to his near-death.

  Chiron remembered being William Packer, Jr. He remembered his family, now all gone. He remembered his life, his girlfriend, who had been left behind, all those decades ago, on Earth.

  William had been a patriot. A foolish, wide-eyed kid going off to fight against the jit’suku menace. He hadn’t returned. Ever. No, his flesh had been torn up in battle and then stitched back together again with all sorts of metallic improvements and a shiny new CCS that had tried to kill William forever and recreate him as an AI with a number, not a name.

  He still answered to the serial number when necessary, but when he’d awoken a few years before—the first of his brethren to do so—he’d taken time to think about a new name he would use with his brothers-in-arms, his fellow cyborgs who were beginning to awaken to who they had once been. After due consideration, he’d decided on the name Chiron.

  In Greek mythology, Chiron had been a teacher of many of the great heroes. Chiron liked the idea that he could help his fellow cyborgs by sharing what he’d learned about being half-machine and half-man.

  The rest of humanity might still think that his human side had been forever blocked by the CCS, but the time was fast approaching when the truth would come out. Chiron wanted to be sure he and his brothers-in-arms were prepared as well as they could be for the fallout from the realization that cyborgs weren’t just artificial intelligences programmed with fail safes and backdoors that no longer worked.

  If handled wrong, the revelation could go very badly for the cyborg community. Chiron wanted to control the information for as long as possible, hoping to choose the right time and place, if at all possible.

  Roxy walked down the narrow hall to her apartment after doing a double shift in the maintenance bay. There had been some skirmishes out near the Eagle jump point, and one of the damaged fighters had been assigned to her bay, so it was all hands to their stations until the fighter was fixed up and ready for battle once more. The station depended on its fighters and the pilots who flew them to spot even the smallest jit’suku incursion.

  Roxy had only been on the station a few weeks, but it had been quiet until today. No fighting that she’d been aware of, but according to the longer-term station residents she worked with, the jit’suku were growing bolder each time they came out of the jump point. Every few weeks, they’d send through increasingly larger forces, and everyone expected that a full-out assault was in the works.

  Which was why so many cyborgs had been stationed here. If the station itself was attacked, it was the cyborgs who would be the first line of defense for the human population. Roxy hadn’t really been aware of it, but her co-workers had claimed most of the families who had lived on the inner rings had already left, and more were departing each time a transport ship arrived that was heading back toward Earth.

  That was probably why the prices for passage had been too high for Roxy to afford every time she’d checked the departures board. The station was nice enough, but she had come to realize she wasn’t going to find the kind of work she wanted way out here on the rim. She had decided to save up as many credits as she could. She had to get off this station, and she had to be able to afford the astronomical prices even the smallest tramp freighters were charging for transport back toward Earth.

  The double shift today had earned her twice the amount she could’ve normally earned in one day, so that was one step closer to passage home. She had to look at it like that or she’d get horribly depressed. As it was, her head was down as she walked the hall toward her cabin, and she didn’t register that she wasn’t alone in the hallway until she ran straight into a very hard, very unyielding body.

  Her head snapped up immediately, her gaze meeting that of her cyborg neighbor. Her eyes widened as his blue eyes sparkled at her.

  “Oh, I’m sorry!” she said reflexively, though she wondered if apologizing to a machine was truly necessary. Still, bad manners were never acceptable the way she’d been brought up.

  “Are you all right, miss?” His voice was warm and deep. Not at all mechanical. But his words had a dry inflection that could have come from the computer-controlled part of his mind. Merely a good AI interacting with a biological entity.

  “I’m fine. I wasn’t looking where I was going. My apologies.”

  “No need to apologize to me, miss,” he said, his tone holding something intangible that made her feel as if this moment was significant.

  She squinted up at him. He had been a devastatingly handsome man in life, and they hadn’t completely destroyed that during the cyborginazation process. There was something so compelling about him. She’d noticed it the few times they’d run into each other in the tight halls that were particular to this part of the station. If he’d still been human, she would have gone for him in a major way.

  As it was, she still found herself unaccountably attracted to the man-machine. The fact that he was more robot than man now made her feel…sort of
…wistful. If only she’d met him before whatever tragic circumstance had turned him into what he was now.

  “My mother taught me to be polite to all beings,” she answered back, still gazing deeply into those sparkling blue eyes. She wondered if they’d been enhanced as well as the rest of him.

  Probably. She knew they made replacement parts that looked almost exactly like the real thing. They upgraded original eyes for people all the time. Things like super-magnification, infrared detection, spectrographic analysis, and more were available—for those whose jobs required it, or the rich folk who could afford to modify themselves just for fun.

  “You see me as a being?” His head tilted toward her in inquiry. Was it merely the curiosity of an AI or was there more behind his query?

  “You were born human, just like me,” she hedged. “I’m not exactly sure what happened to bring you to this pass, but I respect that you were once human, even if they changed you, and you’re now an AI.”

  “You don’t sound so sure,” he replied, surprising her again. Were his eyes twinkling with hidden laughter?

  “I may be a first-rate drives mechanic, but I don’t really know what goes into making a cyborg,” she told him, though she had her suspicions. She’d read a lot on the subject, but of course, the true secrets weren’t readily available from the library. Even the library of a space station like this one. “I mean, I know the CSS is supposed to erase your original personality. That’s what made the government classify you as an AI, right?”

  He nodded slowly. “It’s true the CSS overwrote large portions of my biological brain when it was installed.”

  Huh. She would have liked to ask him more about the wording he’d chosen there, but just as she was about to open her mouth, his com chimed.