by Lyssa Hart
Uneasiness, for sure.
A dollop of fear, because they were so lethal.
And, loathe though she was to acknowledge it—fascination.
Maybe even a teensy, tiny bit of arousal.
Because there was something bad wrong with her!
She was still glad, still relieved, when they told her that she was to go in and collect the samples this time around.
She thought it might mean she was safe from being terminated, permanently, by the company.
And, really, she spent way more time scaring herself stupid than the guys did. She had no actual reason to be afraid of them beyond what she knew they were capable of—or thought.
She hadn’t seen them ‘perform’.
She hadn’t even seen their files.
“They couldn’t coax you to do the tests last time?” Hawk asked in a low voice when she reached the examination table where he waited.
Startled, she flicked a shocked look in the general direction of his head/face, trying to avoid eye contact because she found that deeply disturbing.
Discomfort flickered through her. “I … uh …. Actually, I don’t know why I wasn’t sent,” she said truthfully, wondering why she’d felt it was her ‘duty’ to cover for the company. “They just tell us what to do and when to do it.”
“Like us?”
That question was her downfall. It drew her gaze again and that time he snagged it and she couldn’t look away for several moments. “Uh .. sort of,” she stammered. Except she hadn’t been ordered to kill anybody… yet.
“Do you kill for them?” he asked.
Almost as if he’d read her mind, but she was sure they couldn’t do that. “No!” she gasped without even considering how he might take that kind of denial, the revulsion in her tone, the horror of it.
His expression hardened. “This explains much.”
Alexis didn’t even want to know what he meant by that. She rushed through the remainder of the examination, shaking so badly she could hardly make the notations.
* * * *
Hawk paid for his curiosity, but then he had expected to.
He had thought it was worth it to hear her say what he suspected.
Because he had needed something to crush the thoughts that swarmed him and threatened his equilibrium whenever she was near him.
She wouldn’t look at them because they were monsters in her eyes and she was terrified of them.
That pleasant bit of news was certainly worth undergoing retraining and reprogramming when he went back into stasis.
First they wanted him to ask questions, then they didn’t, he thought wryly.
Humans could be so damned unreasonable.
And that was never more apparent than when he was released abruptly in the middle of the hundredth cycle of the reprogramming.
He was jerked into awareness as if he’d fallen and slammed into a hard surface.
A choking sensation swept through him as the sustainer tubes were withdrawn.
The door to his pod opened.
Surprise flickered through Hawk—that he’d been awakened for a mission in the middle of his ‘retraining/punishment’, but when the adrenaline was shot into him, flooding his system and lifting him from the lingering sluggishness of hibernation to super alert, he stepped out.
Instead of discovering his commander waiting to give him his orders, however, he discovered that all of the pods had opened and everyone had been turned out, a circumstance he had never encountered before that sent a rush of alarm through him.
The commander should have been waiting for them, ready to assign them to their mission—whatever they’d been called upon for—but there was no sign of the commander.
Instead, there was a woman he had never set eyes on standing at the control console in the command center—staring at them with her eyes wide as saucers and her mouth agape. She surprised him. Instead of running in horror, she approached the access to the room where their pods were located, pointed something at them—a camera, he realized—and he heard a series of clicks from it as she backed away.
More curious than alarmed at that point, he stared at her, trying to decide what she was doing and why she was doing it.
He glanced at his squad to see what they thought of it and saw they were as dumbfounded as he was. Brahma glanced at him at almost the same moment. “What’s going on?”
The question redirected Cham-Two and Puma’s attention to him, as well.
“No clue,” Hawk responded slowly, still pondering it.
She sure as shit wasn’t the commander, but the alarm wasn’t sounding a security breech.
The thought had barely formed in his mind when the alarm cut loose abruptly, deafeningly. Lights began to flash all around and he could hear the distant sound of metal doors clapping together. Lockdown. They had been breached.
Almost simultaneously, there was an ominous hiss behind him. He whipped around to discover a cloud issuing from the pod beside him. In a matter of seconds, doubt turned to certainty—not a steam vent or oxygen leak. Something lethal.
Someone closer to the front, Cham from Night Raven squad he thought, yelled a warning. “Fuck! Gas! Out! Everybody out!”
Unfortunately, Hawk and his squad were near the back. Just awakened and still more than a little confused by the situation, they were a little slower to respond than the others and it cost them. Luckily, Bull, from Raven’s team, charged to the opening, planted his back against the door and both hands against the frame. Straining every muscle as he countered the mechanics of the closing door, he held it. Coughing as the deadly gas continued to fill their containment, the members of the platoon surged toward the door and squeezed past him one by one.
Uttering a growl of exertion, Bull pushed harder when the men still within the containment room bottlenecked in their effort to pass between him and the frame. Finally, he managed to break the track and crumple the door behind him. Stumbling out when he felt the door halt its progress, he looked around for his own squad members and found them working to get the outer door open since the gas continued to escape their containment and had begun filling the main control room.
Hawk made it out before he puked, but his lungs felt like they were on fire and it was nearly impossible to drag in a decent breath.
Particularly when the gas had followed them out and was growing thicker by the moment.
“Out of my way!” Bull bellowed, charging across the room full tilt and slamming against the door with his shoulder. It buckled at the blow, but held. Raven, Chameleon, and Lynx began alternately battering at it themselves.
Clearly, it had been designed specifically to contain them. Despite their strength, the four of them had to slam against it repeatedly and were joined by members of Condor’s squad and Eagle’s before the door abruptly gave and fell outward. When it did, a volley of laser fire cut through the poisonous cloud that preceded them out of the room, but the burst was short. The men firing at them whirled and raced down the corridor away from the rolling, deadly fog of gas.
Bailing from the room, everyone halted in the corridor, staring at the guards as they were enveloped by the toxic cloud where they stood waiting for the elevator to arrive. Almost instantly, they began to cough and convulsive. “They’ll have men waiting for us downstairs!” Raven bellowed. “Everybody head for the roof!”
“We can’t all fly!” Bull and Brahma both growled at almost the same moment.
“The drop ships should be on the roof!” Raven shot back at them.
His team charged after him and behind them the other squads, with Hawk’s squad still bringing up the rear.
“This isn’t a mission,” Lynx pointed out.
“If we don’t escape this gas, we’ll be as dead as the fucking guards!” Raven bellowed back at him, finding the stairwell he was looking for at last and battering against the door when he found it locked down.
The gas chased them up to the roof, but once they’d beat the door down at the top, the
entire platoon piled out on the rooftop and sucked in their first breath of fresh air. They collapsed, coughing and gagging, rolling around in agony until their nanos began to repair the damage of the gas, collecting the poisons that had entered their systems and expelling it through their esophagus.
Hawk was mortally pissed off by the time he finished puking. Ditto the rest of them.
“Fucking bitch tried to kill us!” Bull growled.
Raven glanced at him sharply. He wanted to know what the woman had been doing in that secured area himself, but he’d had plenty of time while he was trying to escape to figure out the lay of the land. “The fucking company meant to exterminate us! I’m guessing she didn’t have a fucking clue about the gas or she wouldn’t have hit that button. I didn’t see that she was wearing a mask.”
“Bastards! What the fuck for?”
“Cover up,” several members of the platoon responded in a chorus.
“We don’t know that for sure. If the woman hadn’t been screwing around, we’d still be in the pods.”
“And maybe the gas wasn’t pumping directly into them. It came from some-fucking-where, though,” Raven responded. “Anybody notice?”
“Yeah,” Hawk responded. “I was standing by a pod in the back. It looked like it was coming out of the pod to me.”
“You think it’s likely the security guards didn’t know who we were?” someone asked.
“I don’t think it’s likely at all, but it is possible. I’m thinking, though, that we might want to pull back and consider this situation,” Raven said.
“I’m thinking I want to find that woman,” Chameleon retorted. “That’s where we’ll find our answers.”
The other team leaders moved closer. “I don’t know what’s going on myself,” Condor said slowly, “but this doesn’t feel right to me. We know the woman didn’t belong there, and we also know the company seems a lot more interested, so far, in covering their tracks than anything else—and that says to me they’ve got something to hide … and we’re expendable.”
“He’s right. And it’s been almost fifteen minutes since lock-down. We need to take this discussion somewhere else until we figure out what the situation is,” Eagle said tightly.
Hawk nodded agreement, but he and his squad had probably inhaled more gas than any of the others and he was still having trouble catching his breath. He didn’t especially feel a need to point that out, though, because there wasn’t any fucking thing anybody could do about it.
Everyone turned to survey the transport. There was only one, no great surprise when the company rarely activated more than one micro-squad at the time. It certainly wasn’t going to carry the entire platoon even though they numbered only about a quarter of the men of a typical military unit.
“Even without equipment eight is going to be stretching it,” Hawk said musingly. “We’ve got four strong flyers, four maybes ….”
Chameleon sent him a hard look. “I think we chameleons can manage,” he said dryly. “It’ll be mostly gliding from here anyway.”
Hawk braced himself. If it came to that, he saw no reason why he couldn’t also glide. He didn’t think he was up to doing a hell of a lot of flying at the moment, but that he could manage if he had to.
And it looked like he had to.
Raven nodded and turned to Lynx. “We need a rendezvous point.”
“There’s an abandoned warehouse four blocks south, southwest of our location,” Lynx said promptly.
The men all glanced at each other. “You know if we go AWOL there probably won’t be any coming back,” Puma said pointedly.
“I’m guessing here, but I think we were AWOL the minute we left the pods,” Raven said tightly. “Let’s get going while we still have a chance of leaving without fighting our way out of this.”
* * * *
Alexis was just getting ready for bed when a special news report blared through her speakers and the TV automatically came on.
It took her several moments to recognize the building that was on fire.
Well, she wasn’t actually sure that she would have, but there was a crawl across the bottom on the screen that announced the name of the company that had been demolished by the blast that tore through it.
There had been an explosion at Bio-H-Tech.
There were no reports, yet, on casualties, but it was thought there was security personnel in the building at the time of the explosion.
“Oh my god!” Alexis gasped, settling weakly on her living area seat, staring in stunned shock at the unfolding disaster.
The word personnel connected in her mind, after a few moments, with the cyborgs and she felt her stomach drop. Her mind leapt to images of them as she’d last seen them and she felt a hard unidentifiable knot of emotion form in her chest.
“They’re gone,” she said aloud, trying to grasp it. They must have been in there, she thought, at the same time trying to convince herself they weren’t, that … maybe they’d already been moved, sold to the military and moved.
Because it was just too horrible to think they had been trapped in those damned hibernation pods when the building blew up.
They were next door to indestructible.
But just almost, not when faced with something as horrendous as that.
The knot, she finally realized, was sadness—almost strong enough to call it grief.
She’d been afraid of them because of the power they had and exuded.
And yet, she’d admired them, too, thought they were amazing creations.
And now they were gone, their existence as surely wiped from the face of the earth as her job.
That realization diverted her for the first time and a different kind of dismay filled her.
And she felt just as stunned at that, as disbelieving.
The blink of an eye and her entire world had collapsed and disappeared as surely as theirs had, she thought, struggling to grasp it.
She couldn’t. Her mind kept fluttering around various imaginings, struggling to present her with something less devastating, but she couldn’t come up with a scenario for either the cyborgs or her job that was even close enough to reality to be entertained.
Well, for the cyborgs, yes. There was some possibility, she knew, that the military had claimed them and taken them away, or moved them to a transport facility.
She didn’t know how likely it was—she hadn’t heard that, or even any word suggesting it was about to happen—but it was possible.
Her job … it was in the building that looked beyond recovery to her—like so much rubble. Of course, it wasn’t the company’s only facility, and they had shell companies, but she thought the likelihood of being transferred was probably pretty remote.
It was a long while before her struggling mental faculties got around to speculating on the cause of the explosion.
The news people were guessing—pretty wildly to her mind—but she didn’t buy anything they were trying to pitch.
And, unfortunately, she couldn’t come up with anything.
It finally occurred to her to see if she could connect with any of the other employees and discover anything. But, who to call?
She tried her supervisor first. She wasn’t really surprised to discover his line was busy, but she was annoyed as hell.
There was no point in trying to reach the company switchboard. It was melted down by now.
To save her life she couldn’t think of both names of a single person she worked with and she knew there was no way to look up a number for them without the first and the last name.
She tried her supervisor’s number again. Excitement flooded her when she made the connection.
Then she heard the recording.
“Well hell!”
Chapter Three
Hawk’s thoughts were grim when they reached the abandoned warehouse Lynx had located for them as a rendezvous. Since he and the other squad leaders reached it first, however, he fell back on his military programming and did a thorough s
earch before he relaxed even fractionally. The squad leaders met up with the Chameleons when they reached the entrance again.
“The parameter is secure,” Cham, reported.
“The building’s secure, as well,” Cham-Two, his own squad mate, announced.
They watched as Bull brought the transport in for a landing.
When the men had bailed out and joined them in the warehouse, Raven marked the time. “Fifteen minutes, mark, and we’re out of here.”
Hawk sent him a startled look and glanced questioningly at the other squad leaders, but no one argued.
“What’s our status, in your opinion?” Condor asked him.
Raven shook his head. “I’ve seen nothing to revise my original assessment of the situation—AWOL and targeted for termination.”
“Fifteen minutes isn’t much time for coming up with a plan,” Lynx said tightly.
“Fifteen minutes is a luxury we can’t afford at the moment,” Raven retorted. “They’ll have us located before that. We’ll be lucky to have fifteen. Suggestions?”
“Split up?”
“By squad,” Raven agreed. “Top priority—we need to find somebody that can help us ditch the locators. As long was we’ve got them there’ll be no hiding. Communications. Rendezvous points. Think outside the box. As long as we stick to standard military protocol, they’ll anticipate every move. My squad and I are going after the woman.”
Condor, Eagle, and Hawk exchanged speaking glances. None of them challenged him, however.
Raven was the head of the platoon.
“I thought you said ditching the locators was top priority,” Hawk asked neutrally.
“We need answers … fast. She’s the most likely one to have them. And her pheromone signature is fading as we speak. We’ll have to go after her now or lose the opportunity.”
Accessing their city maps via their CPUs, they settled on rendezvous times and points and a location to post emergency contact signals.
“What if we’re also packing kill switches?” Chameleon asked.
Raven studied him for a long moment. “There’s nothing we can do about that until we can find someone who can find and remove the locators. Maybe we can do something about that, too, maybe not ….”