Ashes and Metal (Cyborg Shifters Book 5) Read online

  It was his damn job, after all, getting the materials needed to the EPED to figure out those explanations.

  Gunner smirked. The mood killer of all mood killers... Let me fuck with your mind.

  APOLLO’s final scans flooded his head and all the information that he needed to know about Nickel’s dying ship.

  “Nickel, even if you are a degenerate, bloodsucking, brainwashed religious zombie,” the glare of his eyes going red spilled across the glass screen, “it appears that your reactor is dying, and what power you do have left stored isn’t enough to get you anywhere. I’d give it, ehh, eight maybe nine cycles before life-support shuts down. You’ll die from depressurization over a span of several excruciating hours. But that all depends on how much food you have left, and considering the way you look, your supply is low.”

  “Considering.” Nickel shifted on his feet. “Unfortunately, this brainwashed zombie has nothing to offer you in return for your help.”

  “Unfortunately not,” he agreed. Over his dead body would he employ a human like Nickel. “Make me an offer with what you do have.”

  “My soul?”

  “Nah, ain’t a soul collector. What else?”

  “The chance to corrupt me?”

  “Are you so desperate to live that you’d give up your beliefs so easily?”

  “A chance. Not a conversion,” Nickel bleated back. “Men like you—I can see it in your mechanical human eyes—need a distraction.”

  Gunner pondered. “Cute. But you’re way below my pay-grade and corrupting young boys isn’t my thing, not that you would ever be able to distract me long enough to care.”

  His eyes drifted to the unanswered missives to Stryker. Maybe the boy’s onto something. His jaw ticked.

  “Ah.” Nickel canted his head. “Too bad I don’t have a pussy to trade with? Is that it? Or is it money you want?”

  “Money is a means to an end and even pussy isn’t worth the amount of siphon your ship will need to get out of here. And I have enough of both already.” He indicated his girls and his gleaming silver-streaked bridge walls. “My guns don’t get a chance to say no. It’s the beauty of pulling the trigger.”

  “What about a good conversation?”

  “Deal.” Gunner snorted, having already decided to help the kid out a little. Not many looked into his eyes and didn’t turn away.

  “Really?” Nickel guffawed before recovering to spear him with a suspicious glare.

  ‘Dock our ships,’ he ordered APOLLO. ‘Scan the perimeter.’

  ‘Docking now. The perimeter is clear aside from Blessed and us. Two moons are in range—’

  ‘That’s all.’

  Gunner waved at his bots and they all returned to their positions.

  Colt, Flashbang, and Browning remained with him on the bridge. He fingered the AutoMag under his jacket lapel, his back to the screen and the boy. When his ship trembled, he knew the docking was complete and that he and Nickel were now connected.

  “Nickel, step away from the Blessed’s control panels,” he barked with his eyes still on his girls.

  “What? Why?”

  ‘Take Blessed over.’ He gave APOLLO the order without waiting.

  His AI flushed from his own ship and flooded into the dying one, bringing life with it. Gunner dipped into the channels after, wincing, hating the weak connections and flickering currents. He fell out and back into his body quickly.

  But not before he locked Nickel out, rewriting the current programs and security access. Gunner couldn’t hold back an unpleasant groan, his digital-self shuddering from penetrating half-dead tech.

  “What are you doing? It’s not responding to me anymore?” Nickel’s frustration poked at the edge of his consciousness.

  “Are you okay, sir?” Browning’s voice gripped him and pulled him the rest of the way out of his uneasy disgust. Gunner returned to the screen without answering her, his eyes again falling on the unanswered messages to Stryker.

  Piece of cybernetic snake shit.

  “I locked you out,” he said. “Get ready for boarding. I’m on my way.”

  A fucking conversation for an energy sap.

  Gunner shut the communication down without waiting for a response. The reflected glare of his eyes receded as the hologram screen shot back into the bridge paneling. He moved to Browning and drifted his fingers across her cold, fabricated cheek. The contact did nothing for him.

  “I need to you take care of the beer, dolly.”

  “Need me to take care of anything else?” A smile graced her lips as her eyelids dropped. He drew a soft lock of her long brown hair away from her neck and shoulder and pushed it back, leaning into the crook of her neck to breathe in her fabricated scent of arousal and the very real smell of hops.

  “Always. Everything,” Gunner whispered quietly against her skin. A series of goosebumps raised in response but he didn’t touch her further. He drew back and gave Browning a once over. “I’ll be back soon but be a good girl and make sure the crew behaves. I don’t want to come back to what you did last time.”

  “You liked what I did last time.”

  “Sure.” Gunner turned away and checked his jacket pockets. “But I like my orders being followed more.” He grabbed Browning’s wrist and pushed her skin back, revealing control overrides and suppressed the fake free-will he usually allowed her, before he dropped her arm. Her head snapped upright and her eyelids raised. The gooseflesh that had flushed her skin settled back down into her.

  He lifted her other hand, kissed the back of it, and left.

  “NICKEL.”

  “Gunner?” the boy greeted back, glancing beyond him to see if he brought any of his girls.

  Joke’s on him. I need all thirteen.

  “Goddesses, your eyes! Are you... are you actually blind?”

  “Am I?” His eyes were an oddity, a malfunction from times past. There was no color to his irises, just a milky grey like that of a fully blind human. The real color never showed unless he focused on something or was feeling particularly hyped.

  Gunner stepped around the kid and made his way to the ship’s mainframe, the blueprints in his head and his AI leading the way. The disarray and interior abuse was on par with some of the ancient vessels. He took in the dented metal—rust coated the edges—and dirt and skid marks across the floors. His nose twitched, filling with must, body odor, and what he could swear was bodily decay. Old bodily decay.

  “You get rid of the corpses?” he asked as he continued through the ship.

  “What? Uh, what? Yes. How did you know? I sent them out to space.”

  “I can still smell them.”

  “How? The last one...died over two weeks ago.” There was a muffled hint of remorse in Nickel’s voice that spoke volumes. It surprised Gunner that of everyone who must’ve been on Nickel’s crew, that he was the one to survive.

  “I have a great sense of smell,” he muttered before the entryway to the reactor.

  Nickel sidled up to him. “That really sucks. I can’t stand the smell right now, and I can’t even smell the decay anymore. You enhanced with cybernetics? Your eyes had a red glow earlier.”

  Gunner forced through the reactor’s separate security, and APOLLO suppressed the breach alarm without question. “You could say that.”

  “I’d like to get some work done myself...”

  They walked into the machine room together, his liner gun tapping his chest with each step. The kid doesn’t see a Cyborg. Not many did when it came to him, because his frame wasn’t as bulked up as some of his brethren; instead, he had a tall, wiry internal structure. The beast didn’t need extra mass to shift into shape. The jackal preferred speed over strength.

  And my jacket hides the rest. Gunner pulled out what he needed from his lining and started on the reactor. There was coding to be done before his ship would be able to connect directly to it, coding that was easier done in person than it was in cyberspace. He peeled back the barricaded, triple-layered mainframe unti
l it exposed the computer housed within.

  “What kind of work?” Gunner asked.

  “A big dick, for one,” Nickel laughed. “The kind that never quits unless forced and does all the work for you. But no, I kid, if I could get anything done, it’d be a metabolism regulator. After these past few months, forcing my body to shut down would’ve been great. You were right about the food. I’m down to quarter rations now.” As he said it, his stomach growled low and hollow. Gunner pulled out a protein bar from one of his many pockets and handed it to him.

  “Thanks man...” Nickel took it without question.

  “Hmm.”

  Gunner turned away and cracked the reactor open like an egg, almost surprised with how easy it was. Any hacker with half a brain could’ve done what he did. The Blessed was a disgrace to all Earthian cybersecurity.

  The security on his own ship had started out the best that money could buy and was then enhanced by a team of his more paranoid Cyborg brethren. He learned from them and now maintained it with APOLLO. Unlike the other Cyborgs in the EPED, he needed the best security. He was given jobs that dealt with monsters on an entirely different level. Human monsters.

  It was a game of Russian roulette with his employers. It was easy for the EPED to put him on missions that were more likely to cause his death than not. He was expendable and always would be. But he was also an asset because he never. Fucking. Died.

  And he never questioned.

  Browning once told him that his death would as likely cause a celebration as it would a wake. That whether he lived or died, the universe would be interrupted for a heartbeat, but it would then go on without him. His death would never be more than a nuisance. But then he stuck his cock in her mouth, she got him off, and he watched in resentment as she traipsed to the sink in his brew room, spit out his seed, and clean out her mouth so thoroughly that it had pissed him off. A sex-bot had angered him. Browning had been demoted to maintenance for a year after that stunt and he had to make do with the others.

  In the end, she won, and his favor returned with his mirth.

  The connection to their ships fused and he left his AI to take care of the siphoning process. Gunner lifted away.

  “You’ll have enough power to get to the nearest port in several hours,” he said.

  Nickel pocketed the protein wrapper and eyed the reactor’s computer. “I appreciate it. So about that conversation? You get lonely out here in space all alone?”

  Gunner slammed one the barricades back in place. “What makes you think I’m alone?”

  “Based on what I saw, you are. Androids are nothing but a shield. The goddesses give them no favor.”

  He turned to the boy. “It’s true, a good guess, I don’t like to share. Humans need others in their lives, robots don’t.” It wasn’t the real reason there were no humans on his ship, but the boy didn’t need to know that.

  Nickel laughed and sat on a nearby pipe. “A shame that. I’d corrupt myself all over them if you know what I mean.”

  Gunner narrowed his eyes. Nickel’s laughter wilted.

  “If you even breathed on my ship, you’d be as good as dead. When I said I don’t like to share, I meant it. I won’t tolerate the idea either.”

  ‘Approaching vessel entering perimeter.’ Gunner snapped out of his anger and pulled out his gun.

  “Shit! I’m sorry, I was making a joke!” Nickel jerked back.

  ‘Power up the guns, hail them, send me diagnostics,’ he flooded his AI with commands.

  ‘Guns stalled while boarded. Hail ignored. Uploading current scans now.’

  Gunner dropped the connection between their ships without turning back, and stormed out and into the hallways of the Blessed. Nickel was on his heels with a barrage of questions.

  The upload couldn’t come fast enough.

  ‘Four ships, heavily armed and targeted on us. More are entering our airspace, sir. They have yet to accept our hail. Should we undock?’

  ‘Yes!’ he yelled in his head, his feet picking up, his body pushing forward into a sprint. The dock was already disengaging when he turned the corner, the doors shutting.

  “Gunner! What’s wrong!?” Nickel screamed somewhere far behind him. Gunner was several yards from the exit.

  I’m going to make it. He was bored, but not that bored.

  But he felt the missile before it hit his ship. He felt the power and the impact as it struck the side of the docking bay, blasting his chances of ever making it back aboard his ship alive into oblivion. The metal crushed and groaned, caving inward then outward, knocking him off his feet and slamming him into the rusted, ancient, used-up side paneling of the Blessed.

  A roaring filled his ears, his head, and consumed his mainframe with a surge. It was enough to make him stand, if only for a moment, before he short-circuited on the spot. His face hit the ground and his eyes flashed once more before that faded too. He reached out, fingers twitching, grasping for something just out of reach.

  ‘Browning,’ his whispered as rage built inside him.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ her message flitted behind his eyes.

  ‘Break. Break all the guns...’

  Their dying programming was the last thing he sensed before he rebooted, and the smell of gasoline replaced the hops.

  Chapter Three

  ELODIE’S EYES DRIFTED open to find the cell she faced empty and yawning and the rest cycle lights still down in a dreary dim. She remained unmoving as her senses came back one by one, starting with the worst; hunger, pain, her emotional state.

  He’s gone.

  At least he’s not dead. At least I didn’t see him die. Her heart thumped.

  Her eyes stared through the empty space and double row of bars to land on the man on the other side of her dad’s cell. He was facing away from her, his back to the bars. He was a gristly sort of fellow, and neither she nor her dad ever liked conversing with him. Elodie couldn’t recall his name. She pretended that he was her dad, just for a few minutes, as she mustered the courage to rise.

  She rose slowly, quietly, feeling her body’s need to expel the tiny bit of waste it’d created since her last meal. It was her most hated part of the day, and as she perused the nearby cells and the prisoners within, her luck bolstered her nerve.

  They’re all sleeping...

  It was the biggest pro on her internal pro and con chart about hunger. It made everyone else around her just as weak as she was. The weak slept.

  Every joint in her body ached as she made her way over to the drainage vent in the middle of her cell, where, twitching and shivering with unease, she lowered her pants, shifted her boxers, and squatted. Her business was done in seconds and she made her way back to the wall.

  Another pro of hunger... fewer bathroom breaks. Dressing like a man had its perks too. Several weeks ago she’d ripped a larger hole in her boxers so she never had to drop them. Kallan had questioned her antics once when he watched her without her knowledge, and she hadn’t realized until it was too late.

  “You got a problem with your cock?”

  Elodie jerked and tugged up her pants. “No.”

  “What the fuck kind of man squats to pee? You got pussy under there?” he taunted and leered. “You do, don’t you? A dirty little cunt.”

  She stopped herself from scrambling to the wall and giving herself away. Instead, she fought to calm her nerves so she could move slowly back into position. Elodie reached down to adjust herself. “You think I’d still be in here if I did? If I had a cunt, I'd've bargained my way out of this hell before they had a chance to close my cell door,” she ground out a laugh.

  “Then prove it, boy,” Kallan pressed up against the bars and grinned. “Let’s see what’s between your legs.”

  Several prisoners around her grunted, snickered, and taunted. Her dad remained silent, and she was thankful for that. Things only got worse when he got involved.

  “You that desperate, old man? I show for cunts, not for cocks. You show me yours first
and then we’ll talk,” Elodie sneered and let her head rest on the wall, closing her eyes. She heard Kallan spit in her direction, heard it land, but didn’t look. She focused on remaining calm...looking unaffected. The issue dropped.

  That was weeks ago, and now her body had been trained to hold everything in until the last possible moment.

  She knew Kallan had his suspicions. There wasn’t much else to do but watch the other prisoners, but she did her best to keep his curiosity tempered. Elodie glanced in his direction, thankful that his eyes were closed.

  Her back hit the wall right when the lights brightened to signify day. The groans of others followed shortly after, and soon Jacob’s sniffling sobs rose to greet the morning.

  She tuned him out and focused on the shut double door of the brig, hopeful and fearful for it to open. She was starving and her mind went back to that moment with Kallan about trading her pussy for freedom.

  Don’t! Elodie yelled at herself, even when her nose caught the first scent of decay from the corpse. Don’t!

  She pushed her fingers through her hair and wished she had scissors to cut off its length. She rubbed the back of her hands over her cheeks and jaw knowing she was one of the only men who didn’t have hair growth there. At least the only one in her immediate vicinity. Her disguise had its limits but it wasn’t all about how she looked, it was mostly about how she acted, and growing up around men, and only men, had helped her immensely.

  Keeping her hair short was easy, and though lowering her voice had been difficult at first, over the years, it had become second nature. Elodie had been lucky enough to inherit her dad’s height—she was nearly six feet tall—and her metabolism and with the constant strain of labor had kept her frame from filling out. She even trimmed her eyelashes, having been born with unusually thick ones, and she wore oversized clothes to hide what little of her frame that curved.

  But despite trying to come off as a ‘man,’ she could only pull off a boyish look. Men bought that look, but it still brought her unwanted attention. The kind that screamed easily dominated, an easy swing for an interested man. There were always shadowed advances from men who had their own secrets to keep, or blatant overbearing harassment from those who didn’t care.