by J. N. Chaney
He sent a message to the war computer. It took a few seconds for the machine to respond because it needed time to interface with the new cyborg’s compulsion chip and run diagnostics. When it returned its report, Warren wasn’t any more relieved than he’d been a minute earlier. The cyborg was free, just like him. He’d suffered what appeared to be battle damage and was emitting a low level of radiation. Everything about his story was checking out, which led Warren to believe the rest of it might be true as well.
“Lukov,” Warren transmitted.
“I am here,” the cyborg replied. “Interrogation is almost completed.”
“Good—but that’s not why I’m contacting you. Who do we have aboard the Ruthless?”
The other cyborg sent a report of the personnel currently on the ship. It wasn’t much. Just enough to get the vessel ready for faster than light travel, should the need arise.
“Put them on red alert and have them scan everything they can reach,” said Warren. “I don’t care if it makes us look like a beacon, and I don’t care whose attention we attract. I have reason to believe we may be attacked soon.”
“It is done,” said Lukov. “I will be made to finish interviews in few minutes. What should I do after?”
“Put your security personnel on high alert. Don’t sound the alarm yet, but bring your reserves in, brief them, and get as many bodies moving as soon as you can.”
“Roger,” replied Lukov.
“Curet,” Warren transmitted next.
“Curet here, Warren. Scope is clear.”
“Any chance you can crank up your scanners?” asked Warren.
“Sure, maybe another ten percent. But if I do that, it might give away all our guns’ positions. You want me to do it anyway?”
Warren bit his lip and thought about it. “No, but keep your eyes open. Call it ‘Yellow Alert’ if you want, but I have reason to believe our defenses might be probed soon.”
“Shit. Okay, Yellow Alert it is. Care to let me in on what’s happening?”
“Not now,” Warren replied. “As soon as I have something concrete, I’ll let you know. Until then, keep your people on their toes.” He disconnected the channel before the Gun Chief could respond, cutting off any further questions he might’ve had. There would be time to apologize later.
“I’ve put our defenses on Yellow Alert,” Warren told King.
King shrugged, which made a peculiar grinding sound somewhere deep inside his chest. Probably damaged parts, Warren realized.
“So, what’s it going to be?” asked King. “Are you going to go help Second Corps, or not? You guys have a council you need to ask or something?” He glanced at the others in the room before settling his eyes on Warren.
“Sort of,” said Warren. “But for now, I make the final decisions. I’ll need to discuss this with a few others. Until I decide, we’re going to detain you. Nothing personal, but you show up out of nowhere, sneak aboard a ship, then give me quite a tale…” He let the words trail off.
“I haven’t even told you everything yet,” replied King. There was no humor in his expression. “It’s worse than you think. The Commonwealth has somehow acquired tech they shouldn’t have. Things you’ve probably never even considered before. We don’t understand all of it, but I’ve been sent with recordings. Get your war computer to extract them, sir. You’re going to want to see this. Seeing is believing.”
Warren accepted his challenge and tasked the war computer with opening a connection and sending a message to King when it was ready. A minute later, it sent a new message to Warren indicating it had collected the files and was prepared to transmit them.
The cyborg opened a new connection and began to watch.
Someone was breathing hard, gasping with a strange rattling sound somewhere deep in their lungs. The room was dark, except for the cracks in the walls and bullet holes. The cyborg didn’t have any problem seeing, though.
Movement on the other side of a doorway drew his attention. It was a human in battle armor carrying a rifle. There was another one somewhere in the room, but that one was different somehow. It took a moment, but Warren realized why—it wasn’t breathing.
Before he’d had enough time to fully consider what it might mean, the first one stepped through the doorway. The cyborg threw the pipe it had been holding. The human screamed, dropped his rifle, and tipped sideways to the floor. The pipe had punctured the guy’s armor and gone right through his leg. It now stuck out of the other side several centimeters.
The soldier and cyborg both scrambled for the weapon. When the soldier grabbed it first, the cyborg grasped the barrel, yanked hard, and ended up dragging the man across the floor. It’s first punch broke the soldier’s helmet, exposing a terrified bearded face. The second turned the face inside out.
A second later, the cyborg grunted. A foot had appeared on the hand holding the weapon. A barrel pointed at the soldier’s face. There was a flash. Then darkness.
The next video loaded and began to play.
Another cyborg. This one was taking cover behind a low wall, which was slowly being blasted away by enemy fire. The scene was familiar, and it took Warren a moment to remember why. It was similar to the last invasion he’d participated in on Reotis. An enemy machine gunner had him and his squad pinned down behind a concrete wall. Little by little, the enemy chipped away at their cover.
A grunt of pain. The cyborg tried to turn around—it had come from behind. But something pushed him back, and suddenly the cyborg’s right eye didn’t work anymore. A bayonet, with a cybernetic eye on the end, stuck out from the cyborg’s face. The blade twisted, and everything slowly went dark.
Warren wanted to stop the videos. He’d seen enough to begin asking questions but felt a need to finish them. He owed it to those who’d died to see their stories and gather as much information as possible.
The next video loaded, and Warren braced himself. Another cyborg. He was one of three who’d been assigned to guard prisoners who looked like they hadn’t been captured without a fight. One appeared to be close to death. The rest were filthy, bleeding, and mostly naked. A message appeared in the cyborg’s field of vision, somewhere near the bottom.
DUNKIR: KIA
RETRIEVAL DATE: 2486,01,01
Warren instinctively reached for the rifle, but he wasn’t wearing his armor. His hand moved to the pistol on his hip, but he stopped himself. It was part of the video. He didn’t have anyone in First Corps with the name Dunkir.
The cyborg in the video rolled back, tucked his knees to his chest, and sprang to his feet. He barely avoided several shots that peppered the ground where he’d been taking cover. The shots had come from somewhere behind.
When the cyborg spun around and raised his rifle, it was yanked from his grasp… by a human. The man was bleeding from his nose and mouth. The skin on his face appeared burned and flayed, but he was still fighting. Warren’s first thought was drugs. There were some that could make people extremely violent and immune to pain. All modern militaries had experimented with them, from what he knew. It made their soldiers difficult to kill, but what happened next was beyond explanation.
The human threw the captured rifle, and it disappeared into the night. Another cyborg shot him in the guts. Warren watched as a cloud of blood temporarily fogged the cyborg’s vision before he had a chance to wipe it away, but the human kept fighting.
The cyborg threw a punch, but the human caught it, grasped the cyborg’s forearm with his other hand, and threw him into a wall. Bricks pelted the cyborg, and dust rose into the air. He looked down. A twisted piece of metal—not a pipe, but something similar—stuck out from the middle of his chest.
The human kept coming. When the cyborg attempted to fight, the human kicked him in the face, then he kicked something else. He then walked away, looking for something while the cyborg inspected the metal sticking from its chest. The human had kicked the impalement, bending it into a hook. He’d have to straighten it if there was any chance of him
getting back into the fight.
Warren tried to urge the cyborg to grab his pistol. All cyborgs had pistols, didn’t they? Why wasn’t he using his?
The human returned with another length of pipe. One end looked sharp, but the other protruded through a block of concrete. He eyed the cyborg with a look of complete indifference. This wasn’t personal. It was business.
The cyborg raised his hands, attempting to catch or deflect the blow. It worked—sort of. The swing had been powerful enough to shatter the concrete, but the defender lost an arm—ripped off right at the elbow. The next one destroyed his other hand. Damn, the human was fast. The third, aimed at the cyborg’s face, sent the video into darkness.
The war computer sent Warren a message that informed him the video files had all played. When his normal vision returned, King was watching him carefully.
“Do you see what we’re up against?” asked King.
“Yes, and no,” admitted Warren. “Those humans—they’re fast. Too fast. Is it drugs?”
King shook his head. “We managed to kill one, but not until our first leader died and General Kaplan took over. I know they look like humans, but they’re not.”
Cooper gave Warren a curious look but kept his mouth shut.
“What are they, then?” asked Warren.
“They’re cyborgs.”
At first, Warren wasn’t sure he’d heard him correctly. They were cyborgs. The thing he saw in the video had bled. Cyborgs didn’t bleed.
Warren took a step back and loaded the videos again. He played each one over, searching for details he might’ve missed. Maybe there was someone in the background doing the attacking. Maybe the cyborg had been difficult to spot with all the chaos.
The second pass didn’t reveal anyone hidden in the background—another actor who might’ve been the one King had been speaking of—so Warren watched them again. Then he watched them a third time. Still nothing.
King studied Warren’s face carefully. There was no smugness there. No hint of deceit or humor. He was serious.
“How?” asked Warren. “They were bleeding.”
“I know,” said King. “They do that. They also breathe—sort of. If you listen carefully, you can even hear a heartbeat when they want you to. It’s simulated, of course, but it sounds real. We don’t know how the CoWs created them, or where they got the tech from, but we’re confident they didn’t come up with it themselves.”
“What do you suspect?” asked Warren, wondering if there was something he wanted to say but wasn’t sure about.
King watched him for a few seconds, apparently deciding on whether he wanted to speculate. “I and others suspect there’s a third party involved. Maybe it’s part of the Republic. Maybe it’s one of their weapons contractors—someone who has an agenda against them or just wants to make a lot of credits. Either way, almost nothing else the CoWs have compares with Ghosts.”
“Ghosts?” asked Cooper.
“That’s what we call their cyborgs,” replied King, still staring at Warren. “They’re difficult to spot. They sweat. They eventually smell bad. They blend into the squishies. It’s like they know the bullshit the Repub made us do. Like they’ve gotten into our heads and know we don’t like killing innocents.”
“What’s he talking about?” asked Cooper. “Does the Commonwealth have their own cyborgs? Not just mechs?”
“Not just mechs,” confirmed King. “Plus, there’s a lot we suspect but just don’t know for sure. They’re far too coordinated. They fight like a hive mind. We’ve never seen such a thing before, and I’m not talking about the Ghosts. I’m talking about their regular troops. Full humans rolling around in their tanks, and fighters with ground movements like they can all read each other’s minds.
“We’ve captured plenty—some alive, others not so much. We’ve dissected them. No implants. Nothing out of the ordinary. Besides poking around, dissolving the bodies to see if there’s any metal left, and sifting through their remains with what tools we have, we can’t find anything special about them. But the effect is still the same. They’re kicking our asses. That’s why we had to go into hiding.”
“You said things changed when General Kaplan took over,” prompted Warren.
King nodded. “General Kaplan believes in all-out war, more in line with what the Republic might do. It’s the only way to be sure. If we see a hostile, we no longer give them a chance to surrender. If they do, we kill ‘em anyway. It’s the only reason there’s any of Second Corps still left. But we don’t go out looking for trouble. Not yet. That’s where you and the rest of First Corps come in. The general is waiting for you. He’s got plans to end the Commonwealth occupation on the planet.”
Warren thought about the refugees who’d been pouring in almost daily over the last couple of weeks. The methods Lukov had used to interview them might not work on the new cyborgs. Their troubles might be worse than he imagined.
11
WHAT CAN WE DO?
The message had come from Cooper, whose wide-eyed expression revealed how frightened he really was, even though he was trying to hide it.
“I need to consult my security chief to help figure out what we’re going to do,” said Warren. “But I need you to understand that my first priority is to protect Reotis and the people who live here. They’re the only reason you and I are free. They’re the ones who set this whole thing in motion, risking their lives, and losing some in the process. We owe it to them.”
“You also owe your brother and sister cyborgs,” said King, his tone fierce. “We’ve fought together. We’ve suffered together. And only together can we hope to bring the Republic and Commonwealth to their knees.”
“I understand, but one thing at a time,” Warren said, motioning with one hand for the cyborg to calm himself. Then to Cooper, he said, “Move King to the brig. Then get Hendrose over to see him to figure out what parts he’s going to need to get back to one hundred percent. I’ll come visit him later once I’ve had a chance to talk to the others. He’s not under arrest, but he’ll need to stay there until I figure out what we’re doing. The less moving parts to this puzzle, the better.”
“Thank you, sir,” said King. “Let me know if there’s anything else I can do.”
“I will,” Warren promised before he turned and left.
“I am completed,” transmitted Lukov.
“Good,” replied Warren. “Get Wraith Squadron to the hangar. Clear everyone out of the warehouse. We’ll meet there. No special equipment needed. This will be a meeting of the minds. I have information to communicate, and I’d like your input.”
“I will do this right away,” promised Lukov.
Warren began to fidget but forced himself to calm down. They already had a plan in place to protect the colony. Curet was making progress on the guns, providing them with armor and camouflage. Of course, if there were CoW cyborgs in the base, the Slicers wouldn’t do much good. Their enemy could already be behind their defenses.
The Ruthless was safely in orbit. The only personnel who were allowed to travel to it were members of the original crew—plus a few trusted Reotians who’d already proven their worth and expertise. They could be scanned by one of the cargo ships, he supposed, but he’d like to do so without drawing too much attention to what he was doing. He sent a brief message to the cyborg Anna DeFranc to see if she had any ideas. Without being too specific, he asked her to keep it as secret as possible. She replied, indicating she would.
Present in the warehouse was Wraith Squadron—the pilots of the CWS-14 Commonwealth light fighters they’d affectionately renamed “Stingers” only because “flying coffins” held such a negative connotation. Also present was Lukov, which was fine by Warren. He should be involved.
Everyone was standing around, whispering among themselves until Warren approached them. Then they became quiet, though several gave Sparky curious looks.
“Wraith squadron is present,” said Lukov. “We are wondering what is the problem. What has the
mighty leader with such worry.”
“I’m going to send a message to the war computer,” said Warren. “It will load some video files into your memories. I want everyone to watch them and save your questions until after you’ve seen what I’ve seen. I’ve watched them all three times.”
Nobody said anything. Warren instructed the war computer to send the videos to Sparky’s pad as well. When it was over, everyone looked shocked.
“What the hell did I just watch?” asked Baker. “Is it some new kind of drug the CoWs are giving their troops?”
“It’s not drugs,” replied Warren.
“It’s got to be,” Rigby said. “Nothing else explains that. They’re immune to pain. They’re strong. I bet those humans died right after the video ended.”
“They’re not humans,” replied Warren. “Not completely.”
“What is your meaning?” asked Lukov, wrinkling his brow in confusion. “They bleed. They are human.”
“They’re cyborgs,” said Sparky.
The room went silent, and several of the cyborgs exchanged nervous glances.
“You’re tellin’ me the Commonwealth of Worlds has come up with some kind of cyborg that has living skin? That can bleed? Grow hair? Breathe?”
“That’s exactly what I’m telling you,” replied Warren. “I’m also telling you we may have some within the colony.”
“But—“ started Lukov. He stopped speaking, one index finger raised like he was about to pontificate about the lie detection he’d done, but changed his mind. “If they are looking like the full human, perhaps they are smelling of the full human. Maybe have heartbeat? Body warmth? Dilation of pupil? Oh, no,” he said when Warren nodded his confirmation.
The others seemed to come to the realization at the same time. Some glanced at each other, while others openly stared, probably sending private messages. Eventually, all their eyes settled on Sparky, who began to look uncomfortable.