by Naomi Lucas
CYBORG POOL BOY
CYBORG SHIFTERS SHORT STORY
NAOMI LUCAS
CONTENTS
Also by Naomi Lucas
Blurb
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Also by Naomi Lucas
Copyright © 2018 by Naomi Lucas
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without permission in writing from the author.
Any references to names, places, locales, and events are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, places, or events is purely coincidental.
Cover Art by Cameron Kamenicky
Edited by Tiffany Freund
Created with Vellum
ALSO BY NAOMI LUCAS
Cyborg Shifters
Wild Blood
Storm Surge
Shark Bite
Mutt
Ashes and Metal
Cyborg Pool Boy
Chaos Croc (Coming Soon)
* * *
Stranded in the Stars Last Call
Collector of Souls
Star Navigator
* * *
The Bestial Tribe Minotaur: Blooded
* * *
Valos of Sonhadra
Radiant
This story is for Kate B. and the wonderful women of ‘Romance with Aliens that look like aliens’ Facebook group.
What could a fabulously wealthy heiress possibly do when an alien monster takes up residence in her pool? Call a Cyborg Monster Hunter, obviously.
OBVIOUSLY.
Little does she know that she just hired a monster to take out another monster.
—
This is a short story done for all those unrepentant monster-loving readers. Expect steamy scenes, funny dialogue, and more arms and legs than you can count. Self-diagnosed mature readers only.
1
She descended the steps of her private interstellar space jet, reeling with lightheadedness and nausea. Every time, she pouted. Every time she was forced to adjust her body to a new environment, it left her ill for days, sometimes weeks. Lucy reached out and gripped her android’s arm.
“Awaiting orders mistress,” it said.
She took a deep breath to ease her stomach. “Please, take me inside. I don’t feel good.”
The android scooped her up and carried her into the billion dollar mansion. It was the only thing she inherited that she ever really wanted. A dozen more militarized androids followed closely behind. Another dozen secured the perimeter.
They carried her through the foyer and set her down in a sunroom that overlooked the exotically alien grounds. Her favorite place in the universe. Where clear flowers bloomed as far as the eye could see, and enormous spiraled trees branched out into equally large leaves. Nestled in the middle of the garden was a large pool, beautifully landscaped to blend in with the rest of the environment.
Lucy frowned.
Her azure blues had turned brown. The gorgeous flowers along the edges were wilting and sinking into the murky water while vines writhed like snakes.
Among the shadows of the overgrowth were bright glints of metal. What happened?
She hadn’t visited Loxuria, her favorite childhood estate, since her eleventh birthday. The very next day, after the celebration, Mr. and Mrs. Larkswest packed her up and shipped her off to attend a boarding school back on Earth.
God, how she loved it.
Lucy leaned against the crystal windowsill and pressed her brow to it. The chill coming off the glass did little to dull her growing headache.
She inhaled and a flowery scent filled her nostrils. Home. It smelled like home.
Attending that school saved her life. She hated saying goodbye to her freedom, but being behind the closed walls of the school shielded her from her parents and their many, many, standards. All of which she’d met, except for one: her inability to accustom to space travel.
Ugh.
Lucy sought out the nearest android. “What happened to the pool?”
“Local wildlife has taken up residence within the water. Current diagnostics indicate a large organism is nesting.”
“A large organism?” Lucy returned her attention to the expansive grounds outside. Her gaze searched everywhere it could, under every large leaf and around each spire for any sign of a creature, but found nothing except beautifully unkempt topiary.
“Yes, Mistress,” it answered.
“Why hasn’t the house security gotten rid of it?”
“According to the data stored, the house has tried, but whatever dwells within will not be moved nor eradicated. The cleaning bots have been picking up and repairing the damage the alien specimen has created for several years now.”
Lucy twisted away. “Several years? Loxuria is a Larkswest estate, my parents even made sure it had its off-world certification as a place of triage if humanity ever came under attack. There’s enough stored here to comfortably house a thousand people for a thousand years. It’s even certified to house the president. How could an alien possibly get in?”
“The house believes you brought it in.”
Her face scrunched up. “That’s not possible. I haven’t been back here in eighteen…” A memory resurfaced of her playing hide-and-go-seek with androids made to look and act like children her age. She’d snuck out of the grounds because it was impossible to hide from those androids any other way, and she hadn’t wanted to lose to them again. “Oh. Right.”
After her daring escape over the topiary hedge, she stumbled upon a flower she’d never seen before and thought it would look perfect among the others in the garden.
Her parents weren’t bothered by her dangerous act. In fact, they were more upset with her disobeying a request. ‘Stay inside and out of trouble! You never know when the paparazzi are about.’
Lucy snorted. More like a demand…
But the Larkswests always insisted that demanding something was low class, and that people like them—like her—requested instead. They had requested she never leave the premises without armed supervision, so in her young mind, she hadn’t done anything wrong.
“It was the flower, wasn’t it?” she asked without expecting a real answer.
“Alien specimen 108. Yes, Mistress Lucy.”
“Why didn’t you get rid of it when it was small?” she called out, looking up at the ceiling, addressing the house itself. “Before the destruction?” Not that what she’d describe what happened outside destruction, more like beautiful chaos, but non-sentient robots cared nothing for human opinions.
“When you brought it in, we accepted it as part of the outside ecosystem. Your late father and mother never overlooked—”
“Stop, please,” she interrupted. Thinking of her parents and their actions made her feel raw. If she could focus all her attention on the problem at hand, then maybe she’d find herself happy on the other end.
I’ll get rid of it myself. Her back straightened. I’ll have my normal, peaceful, restful, wonderful day tomorrow.
At least this situation was nothing compared to her last visit to Elyria and how her brother’s secretary mistook her for a sexbot, or when her brother overrode her ship’s systems and sent her flying around the same galaxy for two months straight
, making her miss her final exams, or when a Trentian clothes designer kept her trapped in his studio for six months because she was his muse.
A nearby android stepped to her side. “Mistress Lucy, what would you like us to do?”
Lucy narrowed her eyes.
“Assemble all my guards and make sure they come bearing weapons,” she ordered, kicking off her black heels and rolling up her sleeves.
2
L ucy stood on the veranda looking out over the grounds. Androids flanked her on either side. They waited patiently together as their chosen sacrifice strode slowly through the water while sending images back to the others.
There was far more damage then she’d originally thought. Much of it had been hidden by the enormous tropical plants that grew around the walls, and the steely determination of her robotic staff in trying to repair the damaged parts to its original beauty.
But cracks ran up the walls, and the back half of the pool had become a dangerous lagoon. Whatever was invading her paradise had dug deep into the foundation.
Her nostrils flared, and her belly roiled with unease. All I wanted was an escape—a blissful period of time to myself before the lawyers find me.
If it were possible to die from sighing, she’d have perished yesterday.
Suddenly, the android within the water vanished.
“What the—?” Lucy took a step closer and leaned over the marble railing.
“We’ve lost signal with 10567.”
“It was just there!”
“Would you like us to investigate, Mistress?”
“No,” Lucy answered quickly. She squinted and eased forward. One second it was there, the next… All that was left of the robot were ripples of water coming out from where it had disappeared. “No,” she repeated under her breath. “You said it was a large organism? What does it look like?”
A holographic image appeared beside her showing her numerous pictures of a wild plant in full bloom. It was long, thin, and rounded out slightly in weaves of vines. Instead of front and back legs, the creature had vine-like tentacles that split farther out and then split again, making the tentacles far more numerous and tinier the farther they were from the main body. Gross, wrinkly suction cups covered the underside of them. The whole animal looked ridiculous as far as she was concerned. Like some kind of flower-octopus wearing a seaweed skirt.
“Eww.” Her lips pursed, and she lowered her infrared glasses over her eyes. The dazzling daytime colors of the garden were immediately washed out as heat signatures became apparent. Lucy located the giant, glowing, red mass. “There!”
She took another step back. The creature was much larger than she’d imagined.
The legs spread out in thick tendrils from the main mass much farther back and tapered off to points at the very end—some of which were less than a dozen yards away from her where the pool started.
Lucy lifted her glasses and peered at the semi-clear waters but couldn’t see them. Hmm. That wasn’t good. They either blended seamlessly with the blue-brown waters or this beast had amazing camouflage.
There was no sign of the android anywhere.
She dropped her glasses back down and stuck noise-canceling earbuds into her ears.
“Hand me the Star Blaster bazooka,” she muttered, moving her stylish infrared eyewear up and down, again and again where the heat signatures slithered nearest her.
This wouldn’t be her first time using a Star Blaster, nor her second. She’d been invited to a bachelorette party once for the daughter of the biggest interplanetary resort hotel chain, and each party-goer had been given one to shoot in celebration. Lucy grinned. The second time she happened to have one on hand while on vacation on Elyria.
“Here you go, Mistress,” one of her androids said through her earbud as the other unfolded a tarp at her feet and carefully placed out a row of missiles. “Would you like us as back up?”
She took the Star Blaster from her minion. “Nah. I’m trying to kill it, not irreparably destroy my property.” Using as much strength as she could muster with her terribly average physique, she lifted the loaded weapon onto her shoulder, where it sat heavily, and peered down its length. She shifted her feet apart.
Her palms beaded with sweat.
Mother would be so disappointed, and so very proud.
Her glasses synchronized with the Star Blaster, and her vision morphed to include targeting and a scope; she quietly aimed at the largest heat-glowing mass she could find.
She licked her lips. “If this doesn’t work,” she muttered over her shoulder, “make sure I get out of this alive.” Without further delay, she released the missile and was thrust back into the steely hands of her minion.
The Blaster was taken from her the moment a horrible roar filled her ears. Water hit her face, bringing her back to the present, and she tore off her glasses.
“Oh my! Reload! Reload!” she screamed as a wall of grimy, slimy, green tentacles rose up to block out the sky, and its many daytime suns.
Her command went ignored as she was forcibly dragged back into her house, but she heard several more rockets being released. The foundation trembled.
Three hours later, the fighting had finally cooled down, and her stores of adrenaline had all but been depleted. Lucy watched the entire mess through blast shields on the main floor. What am I going to do?
Asking the estate would lose her credibility as an owner. She’d gotten the feeling the house was put-out by her return. Larkswest had bombs in its arsenal but—even though she liked big bangs—Lucy didn’t want to completely destroy her pool.
Who could help me kill a monster?
If only there were such things as monster hunters…
She flicked on her wrist-con and sighed, typed in interstellar exterminator services, and hoped for the best.
3
M ia looked up as her office door flew open and a man sauntered through. He grabbed a digital folder out of the inbox holoscreen on her desk.
“Moss! You can’t just barge in here and start rifling through my things!” she said to little avail, as he was already halfway through the file, reading at an inhuman rate. He sat down in the chair across from her desk, eyes never leaving it.
“Mark me down for this one. I’ve seen all I need to see. Some kind of water monster?”
“Are you really spending your vacation doing this? You just got back to Earth.”
Moss leaned back in his seat, interlocking his fingers behind his neck. “Have you seen the pay?”
Mia pulled the digital copy up on her holodisplay.
“Have you been hacking into my servers again? We don’t do personal favors, you know that,” Mia argued. She was the handler for the EPED, and like all Monster Hunters—or Retrievers—in the Earthian Planetary Exploration Division, she gave out the jobs. She was also their human resources representative and the closest thing to a manager any of them had—for as much as anyone could manage them.
“But did you look at the number?” He was looking at it right now.
She glanced at it, and her eyes widened involuntarily. She’d never seen a more dizzying amount of zeros.
“Wow…” A moment passed before she regained thought. “I haven’t seen that amount of pay from a personal job, ever.” She could buy complete clearance to leave Earth with that amount of money. She could bypass so much documentation. She took the job with the EPED so she’d have better leverage to obtain relocation but then the laws kept changing every six months. Mia sobered. No wonder why Moss wants it… “But did it ever occur to you that you don’t need any more money?” she asked, slightly put-out.
“No. That did not occur to me. Watch it continue to not occur to me as I prep my ship to launch.” He smiled brightly at her.
“Moss, I haven’t even vetted this file yet. It came in overnight.”
“Bear don’t care, honey. Bear don’t care.” He rose from his seat.
I’m losing him. Mia shot to her feet. I just got this job. I can’t m
ess it up yet. “You do care. Just because—”
“Mia.” He turned to face her and blasted her with his most charmingly stubborn smile. Cocky ass undying tardigrade pain in my side. But she couldn’t help smiling back.
“You know this one is perfect for me,” he continued. “That number is perfect for me. And it’ll make me happy… Don’t you want to make me happy?”
“Don’t you dare give me puppy-dog eyes, Cyborg,” Mia warned.
“They’re reserved for you, and only you.”
She sagged and looked at the ceiling of her office. “I can’t win with you.”
“You’re the best.” He turned back to the door.
“Don’t you forget it,” she called after him. “I’ll finish processing the request today. You better bring me back a nice souvenir. I want a yacht!”
4
M oss waited for clearance to land. His ship hovered in the stratosphere above Larkswest Estate. It was the closest he was allowed to get before Loxuria security measures would be triggered, and if he knew anything about the extremely wealthy, it was to never underestimate their devotion to protecting what was theirs.
Far below was a mansion and military-grade bunker with grounds spanning for miles in every direction. He surveyed the landscape while he waited.
There were few outlying buildings from the main structure but there were many security checkpoints throughout. He couldn’t see them, but they registered on his screen. Whoever designed the place post-war had kept the integrity of the alien ecosystem intact. It was all perfectly integrated, perfectly remote, and utterly beautiful. They’d made damn well sure the ecosystem would be minimally impacted around the estate.
Inside was something else entirely. He ran a scan for human and android life forms.
One human. Eight hundred and fifty-three functioning robots. The one human, his current pseudo-employer, was en route. Heading for wherever I’ll be cleared to land.