Ursa Major (Cyborg Shifters Book 7) Read online

And incredibly strong and incredibly deadly. They lived long lives, were exceptionally hard to kill, and were enhanced with the finest technology humans had ever created.

  We made gods.

  Literal, breathing gods.

  Hecking heroes.

  Meeting one was an honor… A scary honor. Nightheart unnerved her, but the one in the image—Cypher—appeared way more intense.

  Vee sighed. Not having experience with men in the slightest, how was she going to pretend to be a burly, badass-looking, should-be-in-a-romantic-movie power-wielding giant? She rubbed her lips in thought. The digital specs didn’t say how tall he was, but he appeared to be tall…

  He had long, messy brown hair, scruffy facial hair, and pale beige eyes, so bright they were inhuman. His frame was big and brawny, and muscles hinted at beneath his tight clothes were large enough to tear the fabric if he flexed too hard. He could’ve been a warrior berserker or a bodybuilder.

  Whoever came up with his design must’ve been a woman. Her throat tightened at the thought. Heat fluttered in her belly. A woman with a singular, raw fantasy: the need for a man that was more than one of those stringy alley dwellers in the city below. Something better than those wearing old leather and rusty facial piercings. A man that didn’t reek of smog and dried sweat, or had the cool aura of the military.

  And then there was the fact that he was a Cyborg. What was she going to do? How was she going to pretend to be this, even on the network?

  Vee glimpsed the time on her screen. 7 p.m.

  She closed the contract file and squeezed her eyes shut. I can do this. It won’t even be that hard. All of Cypher’s information was in the packet Nightheart had given her. She had one week to add his profile onto her media site and introduce him to her followers.

  But not tonight.

  Tonight, she was going to celebrate, make margherita pizza, and play her game.

  Today was a good day. She inhaled. Tomorrow, Vee decided. She’d become a man. Play at being a man. Roleplaying can be fun, right? People have been playing at being other genders for millennia, many becoming them entirely.

  Her lips curled into a smile.

  What could possibly go wrong?

  2

  Beep… beep… beep...

  Cypher ignored the sound and continued watching the numbers of Ghost City, the specs, the programs and the city ship’s security modules. Blips happened often and usually weren’t his to take care of.

  Numbers ran through his head like an endless stream, and he was always aware when there was a blip in the system, or when there was an incoming or outgoing ship.

  He was Ghost City’s watcher, after all.

  There were others who ran Ghost, and those Cyborgs were as much loners as he was. It was easier that way when you ran the Cyborg mecca—when every Cyborg you dealt with was an independent asshole who disliked answering to anyone. When dealing with a group of highly adverse men and several women, distance was key.

  Cyborgs especially didn’t enjoy secrets.

  That’s why those who ran Ghost City remained away from the general population. Most knew one or two on the council, and the rest were all authoritative shadows. To deal with those on the council directly was difficult, even for his kind. The closest to a spokesperson Ghost had was Breco, and even Breco was a shifting shadow in a sea of other, more prominent shadows.

  Cypher worked for the council. He knew who they were and couldn’t care less about their elusiveness as long as they left him alone.

  Solitude was the way of this bear. He stretched out his fingers as Ghost City’s numbers ran through him in waves.

  When the council formed nearly sixty years ago after the Great Galactic War, Cypher was among the leading group. He was there when the city ship, now known as Ghost, was acquired. He even had a say in the retired military ship’s procurement. His commission went towards it.

  He’d helped in rebuilding it, updating it, securing it. Ripping out the guts and making it into what it was today. A ghost.

  A dangerous, silent, shielded machine that could be likened to a Cyborg in many ways, all except the organic components. It slipped through the darkness of space without a sound, vanished in a blink of an eye. Ghost was the closest thing Cyborgs had to mysticism.

  Part of him was Ghost City. He was the data hound and security expert, but he also relayed information to his brethren seeking entry. It was a needed haven for a people who had no real home, no real place to go after the war. Without war, or a common enemy, Cyborgs had little else to focus on. Many of his kind struggled to find their way.

  Cypher joined most of his brethren in the exodus from an exhausted and used-up human military, though some ‘borgs remained behind.

  Staying with the military, taking commands from lesser men, wasn’t for most of his brethren, especially not him. Not all men were lesser, but many were by the end of the war. Too much pain, hopelessness, bitterness, and death had a way of twisting one’s mind.

  And human men were too tired to care after enduring so much suffering.

  So Ghost got its system.

  Me.

  Everyone had access to Cypher when seeking—unlike the council—and were given the city ship’s coordinates when needed.

  Gatekeeper. Stabilizer. Watcher. Even bouncer.

  Motherfucking werebear.

  He cracked his knuckles. No one could do my job.

  He was great at it because of what he was. Bears hibernated. It was easy for him to deactivate and spend hours, days, even weeks in his head, hooked up to machinery. He could power down at a moment’s notice and stay that way for an exceedingly long time. Years if he had to. His hardware and systems were built for such a feat.

  While others needed the occasional protein intake, his body would self-maintain. All Cyborgs could self-maintain… for a time. But unlike the rest, Cypher could go near indefinitely.

  And there’d been times where he didn’t emerge for months, or no more than several times a year, losing himself in the endless miasma of running numbers, systems updates, and the occasional blip.

  Scanning the streams one final time, Cypher rose and unhooked the wires attached to his arms.

  His time of intermittent hibernation ended six months ago. Leaning back, he cracked his neck and lower back and then turned to the bench and weights stacked in the corner of his room.

  Zeph—or Hector, some might call him—put his kind on alert throughout the universe for unprecedented actions. Like kidnapping a woman and child from a renowned client of the EPED, a division run by one of their own.

  Since then, Cypher had something else to focus on: the intergalactic media.

  What with protests popping up and distrust for his kind at an all-time high, a sect of humans—those with small dicks—wanted them herded up and destroyed. Small-dick men wanted their power back.

  Not like we ever really took it from them. Cypher grunted. Not even those tiniest of dicks could find a way to slide in and penetrate his defenses. Cypher’s cyber fortress would stand forever.

  Go big, or go die.

  Rumors abounded of the existence of Ghost. Some jackass spilled the beans. The Cyborg city ship had always been a well-kept secret until recently.

  The workout bench creaked when he lay onto it. Leveling his eyes with the bar, he gripped it and lifted all two-thousand pounds without heaving.

  Every day since Zeph’s blunder, Cypher had spent hours working out. It was a way to get the aggression out of his systems. And he was fucking aggressive. Joining Ghost’s team and remaining in hibernation most of the last sixty years hadn’t just been a job to him; it was an escape from his beast.

  A beast that loved to gore his enemies and tear them to shredded bits at the drop of a hat.

  Beep.

  Security alert.

  He frowned, lowered the bar to his chest, and turned his head to his systems setup.

  Beep. Beep. Beep. Security alert!

  Cypher popped the bar back in place and moved to the panel, plugging himself back into Ghost. It took him a moment to realize the beeping wasn’t coming from Ghost at all, but from his internal systems.

  What the fuck? He jerked out the wires.

  Behind his eyes, a neon red webpage emerged with bold black text.

  Flinching from the assault, he swiped it from his mind to project on a screen before him, enlarging it, tensing.

  Several pop-ups for virtual reality gaming gear flooded the sides of the page. A thunderdome tune hit his ears, and right at the very top, front and center, was a picture of him on the page.

  Little bunnies hopped across the top of his image, shooting each other with laser guns. The lasers bounced around in myriad neon colors.

  Stunned, he stared at his image.

  How?

  Above the murderous bunnies was his name in bigger black letters.

  Welcome Cyborg Cypher

  My first partner!

  My name? Not only was there an image of him on this site, but his name as well. Two things that shouldn’t exist anywhere on the network.

  Below it, messages started popping up from people responding to the announcement.

  ‘Oh my god, Miles, a real Cyborg? Or just a pretender?’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘A partner!’

  ‘Does that mean you’re going to the championships!?’

  They kept coming.

  Beep. Beep. Beep. Security alert!

  He shut down the alarm with a virtual slam. But then the beeping restarted, and another blog post with another image of him hit the top of the page. What the fuck? His fists clenched. This one was him in his military uniform. There was a rifle under his arm, a rifle he still had today.

  A picture he’d never seen before, never even knew had been t
aken, was now posted on this site.

  A holographic bunny hopped off his screen and shot at him with virtual lasers, dancing all the while. He grabbed the fucker and squashed it, and the other bunnies fled. They didn’t return.

  Information pooled onto the media page in real time. His eyes darted to the posting, reading it in seconds. To his horror, it was all about him, things he’d never shared with anyone else, specs even, and configurations of his makeup.

  His honors in battle.

  Even my fucking animal.

  Along with numerous other attributes and personal preferences, like a fondness for sleep. It’s not sleep, motherfucker. It’s hibernation.

  Cypher read over the information several times, still in disbelief. It just wasn’t possible. But as details about him continued to leak, his mind went to the poster. He didn’t know how much time had passed. Three minutes, two hours? It continued to his abject horror.

  Hundreds of ways to seek out the poster, Miles—V. Miles to be exact—and destroy them shot through his head. His muscles vibrated with rage, and tension built inside his systems. His metal plates shifted, urging him to release his bear.

  All thoughts of Ghost and his duties vanished from his mind.

  Sharp silver claws shot out of his fingers, and he swiped out in fury. They struck part of his paneling, slicing through it. His body grew.

  Messages continued to pop up on the holographic screen, and as he took in the information being released, the rage built. Someone began to answer the messages, and answer those about him accurately while using his name.

  Someone had dared to steal his identity.

  Someone was pretending to be him.

  V. Miles had gotten a hold of his information and leaked it onto the network.

  And somehow, someway, they thought they could get away with it. A dark rumble sounded from his throat.

  Without waiting any longer, Cypher hacked into the site’s mainframe and found his target.

  Vengeance took over.

  3

  It’s done.

  Vee slipped into the hover train and found an empty seat. She licked her lips, studied the other passengers around her, and wondered if they smelled new money in the air. Was that possible? Her paranoia said it was.

  Stop it. No one knows but you.

  She shook her head.

  The EPED had wired the funds to her account this morning, and she left the bank with her wristcon clutched in one hand and the other supporting it. The train zipped through the skyport and into the airways above the city, and she settled into her seat with an exhale.

  Now that she had money, it seemed like everyone around her somehow knew. Loosening her hold on her wristcon, she put her earplugs in and looked out the dirty window to her side. Smog peered back at her.

  She tapped her finger on her wristcon to the music blaring in her ears and tried to relax. When she didn’t think she could take her unease anymore, she glanced once more at the people around her and slipped on her glasses. Her media site popped up, and her glasses scanned her pupils, logging her in.

  And there it was, right at the top.

  Another new message from Cypher. A guy who contacted her hours after her first post on her page a week ago.

  Her ‘real’ fake Cyborg teammate.

  Or so he claimed.

  Every day, a new message waited for her, and though she hadn’t yet responded—trolls will be trolls—her worry increased with each one. What started off as merely requiring an eye roll, a delete, and a block turned into something more sinister. Not blatant harassment, but something uncomfortable and subtle, building more each day.

  She didn’t know why he targeted her, but she had her suspicions. Some of her followers were anti-cyborg, artificial intelligence, and mecha. She’d lost a few after her announcement, so it might have been one of them.

  But this…was a little extreme.

  The block should’ve worked. Vee stared at the new message notification. She didn’t understand it. An IP block to another IP block was absolute. In this day and age, one’s IP was like your secondary social security number. You only had one. Any more and you needed special privileges… or you worked for the government.

  One’s IP was as sacred as your thumbprint and eye scan. It was your virtual personal identity.

  But the guy came back. She blocked him the next day, and he came back again.

  It shouldn’t have been possible.

  She contacted the server her site ran on, and they said they didn’t know what she was talking about. There’d been no blocks coming from her end, and this ‘other Cypher’ wasn’t reading on their end either. She took screenshots and sent the images to them. But they claimed they never received them, and when she went to load the images again on her page, they were gone from her computer.

  She contacted the EPED after several days of fighting with the site’s server but couldn’t get through to Nightheart. A woman, Mia, gave her a half-assed response saying not to worry about it, and that they would look into it.

  As the smoggy city zipped past her, the others on the train fell from her mind.

  Sweat slickened her brow.

  Vee stared at the message notification for the rest of the ride, only stopping when it was her time to disembark and take the railway home. She didn’t stop for groceries or to check on her elderly neighbor down the hall, but went straight to her apartment and locked herself in with a shudder.

  Perhaps she wasn’t paranoid about having money. Perhaps I’m nervous because of him. The stranger on the network.

  Bees, her tabby cat, came sauntering up to her and rubbed his face against her leg. She scratched her baby behind the ears and went to her mini kitchen to feed him. After making herself a sandwich, she slipped off her shoes and settled on her bed, looking around.

  Nothing had been moved, nothing was out of place, but she remained tense.

  She lived in a five-hundred-square-foot studio. From the entryway, her bed was in the back left-hand corner, her kitchen in an alcove to the right, opposite her bed. There was a detached bathroom with a cleansing stall next to the kitchen, the only space fully partitioned except for a closet between her bed and the kitchen on the back wall.

  With only one window, she bought a giant mirror to stand next to the door to the right, giving the illusion of more space. And in the open space between her bed and the door was her equipment—a giant square box without walls.

  Straps hung from the corner poles to keep her anchored when she played standing. But there was a chair positioned in the middle—currently plugged in—that could be moved in and out of the box at will. The top was made of metal and plastic, with projector tech and additional outlets for add-ons attached. It ran parallel to the ceiling.

  There was a big old chair in the front corner on the left that’d seen better days. But it was her favorite place to study, with Bee’s cat tree beside it. Her walls were decorated in cheap cloth tapestries, most depicting outer space, some with whimsical designs. It was cramped but clean, and best of all, it was hers.

  She moved in several years ago, and so far, it had served her well. Paper-thin walls and old appliances included.

  With three million, I can finally move into a bigger place. One with better security. Yet the thought only made her tired. Her eyes dragged to the floor.

  I have no time to move, not until after the game.

  Which meant she couldn’t invest in new equipment yet, either. There would be no room for it.

  Vee ate her sandwich and set her plate aside.

  She glanced down at her wristcon and petted it with a finger. She turned to Cypher’s file on the bed next to her and then to her Terraform Zero equipment.

  The championship was two months away. She had three separate simulations running, each testing her abilities in the hardest way possible.

  Yria, a predominantly water planet with primitive sentient life.

  Then there was Okran, a planet much like Earth but with hostile giant carnivorous beasts, three suns, and low gravity.

  And finally, Juntao, a desert planet with constant sandstorms and tornadoes but with enough fossil fuel and minerals to be a goldmine for any extraction company.

  There was much more to each of them—ethics, environment, economics, and industry—but she wasn’t going to get into that now.