by Jolie Mason
Samuel keyed up the heads up displays file image and took a look at the doctor in question; pert nose, sickly pale skin, mousy hair and deep brown eyes stared back at him. You could almost see the distraction in her eyes, not unlike the distraction he saw in Manning's at times.
Another dossier slid before him. "Olivia Trainer, Korsky's assistant is listed as missing. That suggests she did not disappear to this lab on grant money. These two women may help us."
"All right," he said. "We'll preserve these targets and determine their willingness to cooperate."
She dangled her fingers nervously over the last dossier. "There's more. You haven't looked these over." Again, she wasn't asking. He shook his head to confirm. "You need to."
He picked it up: Subject 375, no image on file. It was a page one, mostly redacted medical file. This person was being experimented on, and central had issued a kill order on them. He seethed.
"This could be one of us," he said. She nodded slowly.
He breathed in deeply. "Okay, we have three captures, three kills."
The doctor caught his glance at her. "I am allowed to kill the other three?"
She shrugged. "By my assessment, they appear to be enthusiastic participants. Fire away." He stared at her in amazement.
"That's a little more blood thirsty than I had expected."
"I have no sympathy with cold blooded killers, but these three could be assets to your group. We won't know till we talk to them."
Star rolled her eyes. "Would you like us to get you anything else while we're out?"
"As a matter of fact, one of the targets is an expert on cyber enhancement. I need all his equipment, files, computers and any potential nanite tech you find."
Samuel covered his mouth to hide his smile at the look of shock on Star's face. She'd been sarcastic from the day she'd been born, she'd said more than once, and here was this brilliant doctor who seemed mostly immune.
"We'll get you everything we can, Doctor."
He finished the briefing with one eye on Dr. Manning who drank in details like a fish drank water. She missed nothing, and she hid nothing. He was now thoroughly convinced the woman knew nothing of these experiments. He was also feeling guilty for ordering Thompson to hurt her. It wasn't the first order he'd ever regretted, and he imagined it wouldn't be the last.
*
Eisley stood behind the unit's comm officer as they approached the targeted facility. She wore a headset and had a monitor plugged into a cam on Chief Mosebey, so she could inspect his finds and say yes or no.
The transport pulled over the roof of a building much like the one she stood in, and, one by one, the four man team rappelled to the hard surface, guns up, and she watched Samuel move in behind Thompson. They wore all black, generic uniforms with no identifying insignia and face masks.
She heard Samuel whisper "clear," and then they attached a small, controlled explosive to the door near the handle and moved back. At the loud pop, she flinched, and then the men rushed into the facility. There were two guards prior to making it to the lab which made up most of the occupied base. She looked away as Samuel quietly twisted a man's neck, then said a soft, "Sorry, Doc."
She felt a little faint, but she choked out, "It's all right. Go on." He couldn't see her, thankfully, or he'd have seen she was lying. Even if these people were some of the most hardened of criminals, she reacted to witnessing their deaths. She took a deep breath.
"That's the lab ahead. Has to be." she said to Samuel as they rounded the corner and approached, two by two, the wide double door. Busting in, the men encountered Olivia first. Tanner ordered her on her knees. The young woman was terrified. Samuel continued to sweep the lab. A slight scream sounded from his right, and he scanned that way just long enough to see Thompson subdue Korsky.
She stood to attention, and leaned into the monitor. "Samuel, turn right. You'll see a console on the counter before you. Get closer. Is that security sign in Korsky's?"
"It is. This the one?"
"Yes, insert the program there." She waited as he did it. It took several minutes for the program to do its work, and the comms officer spoke up to say, "Upload in process."
That was objectives one and two. "Now, let's find those nanites."
*
CHAPTER SIX
She hadn't believed it when the men brought in the stretcher carrying Subject 375, now named John for her grandfather. She'd almost reacted badly at the sight of what had been done to him.
She had to put it out of her mind because Korsky was on the other side of the door she stood in front of. "Can you do this, Doc?" Samuel put a hand on her shoulder that was meant to be comforting. She worked hard not to react to the desire to lean into the touch.
"I can do this. I'll know if she's lying about the science. You need me in there."
He nodded, and opened the cell door. The woman was tied to a chair. Her brown hair tousled and the lieutenant sat casually alert, with one leg up on a chair seat watching the prisoner.
The two men acknowledged one another, and Jeff turned to go. Eisley noticed one last shared glance between him and Korsky, then he was gone as if the hounds of hell were after him.
"Korsky," she said, her voice breaking a little. "How involved were you?"
The woman raised her head. "Not in the way you think. I was working with central."
Samuel sat in the chair Jeff had abandoned. "So, you're working with central?" He said it skeptically.
The woman nodded. "The lieutenant told me who you are."
"Did he also tell you central issued a kill order on every person in that lab?"
"And, you honestly believe that disqualifies me from being an asset?" She laughed softly and bitterly. "What have you done with Olivia?"
Samuel looked down at the dossier. "Your assistant is fine. What did you do to the cyborg?"
The woman's mouth tightened. “He wasn't my project. I was working on a stem cell project that could deliver modified DNA to a patient. I'm more than happy to give you Dr. Bronson's access codes. I assume you captured our file storage."
“How do you have those?”
“I was working for Central. I stole them.”
Eisley wrote down the passwords the doctor gave them, and stood to excuse herself. The tension of the whole situation was getting to her. She wasn't used to questioning people or solving medical mysteries beyond her skill set. She was a researcher. She wasn't that good at working with people, truth be told.
Back in the lab, she opened the files easily on Subject 375. She hit the comm to the interrogation room. "Samuel, I have the files. John's in a lot of pain. I'm going to start on this."
"All right," he said stiffly.
Eisley went back to work unraveling the horrors done to the now unconscious man on the hospital bed. The man she'd called John was handsome beneath the changes that had been made to him.
He lay there looking like a little boy with tawny skin and a full bottom lip that looked like it could be pouting. He was already aware of the changes made to him. She couldn't even begin to make sense of the vast surgeries and augmentation, or how exactly they were accomplished. His blood contained some amount of nanites that seemed to maintain and, in some cases, modify his body with it's new cyber appliances. The man had a prosthetic arm. She had no way of knowing if the doctors had removed a perfectly good arm to put this tool in its place, but the thought sickened her.
She grabbed a mobile computer and began annotating his vitals. With her eyes on the screen, she didn't notice him stirring. His voice shouted out suddenly, "Livvy!"
She went to the man immediately. "It's okay. You're safe now."
His rich brown eyes were frantic as he took in their surroundings. "Olivia," he said. "Where is Olivia?"
"Olivia Trainor?"
The man began trying to get out of bed. He had multiple surgeries to recover from and God only knew what else. "Wait. Wait. I'll get her. You can see her. Just don't get up."
He settled a
look on her with hard eyes. "Bring Livvy," he ordered.
Eisley put her hands out and assured him, "I will. Just hold on."
She went to the comm. "Samuel?"
"Yes," he said.
"I need Olivia Trainor in the med lab, very quickly." She added the last with an urgent sound in her voice. There was a long pause.
"Are you having a problem?"
"Not yet, but John is awake and insisting he see Olivia. I'm recommending we try and see if it helps him remain calm."
"Done. I'll send Thompson."
It didn't take Thompson long. The younger woman ran straight to the man on the bed who clutched her close, whispering her name. Eisley stared at the pair, then looked at Thompson and back again.
She gathered herself, but she thought the image of these two; a slip of a girl and a man in literal pieces holding onto each other for dear life, would follow her for the rest of her very likely short life. She ignored the dull ache in her chest and walked toward them.
"Olivia," she said. "I'm Dr. Manning."
The girl did her best to put herself between Eisley and her cyborg.
"I am trying to help John."
The girl's hair fell around her face, and her lip trembled as she looked at the man and ran a hand over his face to his ocular implant. "You gave him a name."
"Of course, there's no mention of his identity in the files."
"He doesn't know his identity." Olivia spoke in a soft pained voice as she leaned in closer to press her forehead to his face. "He came to the lab wiped. No memory. No records. I checked."
"You checked. You cared who he was, yet you let them do this to him."
The girl teared up, and the man turned to glare at her. She noted wistfully that the cyborg, John, pulled Livvy close protectively. "She did what she could. She was a prisoner as well."
His voice dared her to pursue the subject.
"All right," she said, sitting down on a stool. "Then maybe, you two can elaborate on just what was done to you, and we can see if I can fix you."
"Most of it you can see." The young lab tech still clung to her former charge, making Eisley worry about how they’d pry her off soon. "I changed some of the test results so that they had to stop and wait for his white count to go down. We were running out of ways to stall."
"Natalya was in on this?"
Olivia paused, looked at John, and said nothing. "How do we even know who you are?"
"Good point. My name is Dr. Eisley Manning, and I recently found out that someone has taken my research to bio engineer super soldiers. I am not happy. Thompson there is one of those soldiers. He is also not happy. We've decided to do something about it. You in?" Eisley cut her gaze back to Olivia.
Sudden fire lit the girl's nearly black eyes. "I'm in. Where are we?"
"They haven't even told me. We're in a remote location, hidden from everyone, and we have equipment. I need some information from you. First, were you aware that Dr. Korsky was working as an agent in the lab?"
"I knew she was trying to get us out. She talked about her contacts all the time. She didn't share much, and I was a bit focused in my interests." She said it as she picked up John's hand and squeezed.
“Did you know there had been a termination order on the lab?”
She swallowed. “A termination order?”
“Yes, lucky you. They chose your executioners badly”.
Eisley found herself believing the pair of lovers. She nodded at Thompson, who asked, "You're sure?"
"As sure as it's possible to be. Let's find her some quarters. Something secure until we know everything." She let her gaze fall back to the pair so drunk on each other they weren't listening. "John, I'd like you to remain in the medical unit till I know just what potential problems you may have. You are certainly a first for me. I'll need Olivia's understanding of your systems."
"He's a first anywhere. The project hadn't been done before. He's the first prototype, but I doubt he's the only one. My guess is that someone has a newer model up and possibly running. We became obsolete."
Eisley raised her eyebrow. "That could certainly be part of it." She turned and pulled on the comp cart. "Come and walk me through the basics, Olivia, and then we'll break for lunch."
Eisley watched the cyborg reluctantly let Olivia walk away as he held onto her hand for long moments. She tried to ignore the feelings blooming in her chest at the sight. That this wasn’t fair seemed the understatement of the century.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Samuel was letting Tanner handle the prisoner. He didn't quite trust her yet, but he thought she believed she was helping. That much, he thought, seemed real. He’d put money on the kill order coming as a result of her intel.
As he walked through the base toward the labs, he thought maybe he should have had Thompson stay closer to the doctor. God only knew what the cyborg could be programed to do.
He should have guessed that his superiors would be chasing every method, every experiment, to make their super soldiers. He'd believed, as had the whole world, that the Cyborg Project begun twenty years ago, had netted no results but to be shut down as inhumane and unnecessary. Of course, the genie was out of the bottle. He shook his head to himself as he approached the big, secured doors.
He ran a card through the reader to override and went inside. He reminded himself again that they needed to do the security upgrades, but it was going to be costly and hard to do without attracting attention.
The sight that greeted him was disconcerting to say the least. The girl, Olivia sat on a gurney pointing at the screen on a portable computer and eating an apple. The cyborg sat on the opposite side of the room, knees up on a gurney watching, indulgently almost. Eisley... Dear god, Eisley.
She sat cross legged. She'd removed the lab coat she'd worn earlier and pulled her dark hair up into a twist and put a stylus through it. She wore her corrective lenses down on her nose. He wondered why she needed them, just in passing. Most people could get most vision problems corrected as children now.
Her shapely breasts were encased in a bright pink, sleeveless top that dipped softly between her breasts. He let his eyes linger there.
Enhanced vision sometimes had its perks. He couldn't decide if this was one of those times, since the sight of those breasts gave him very inappropriate thoughts for a man standing in the middle of a lab staring at a woman who was basically his captive. He didn't hold any illusions about it. He wouldn't let her leave if she asked to, therefore she was their very cooperative prisoner.
Pillowy. That was the word for them, he thought. Those breasts would haunt his dreams tonight. He let his eyes roam a moment, until he realized he'd have to stand there with an erection if he didn't stop.
"No, the physical unit holding his processors is here. This is the circuit unit that connects that to his nerve center and a few other control boxes. They concealed it all deliberately. It's all here, situated behind the interface panel accessible in his side. If you look at the scans, you'll see that the interface wires connect to a framework woven up his spine and tapped into the central nervous system."
Eisley rolled her eyes. "I know that, but how is that affecting the organs of the chest cavity? How is this much hardware not overcrowding his body?"
"It's miniaturized, for one thing, very much so. I never said this was good for him." Olivia sent a sad smile to the cyborg. "The implants themselves are not harming him at this stage. My concern is the processors’ effect on his brain. You could never get them to admit we might have limitations in our feeble human minds... ."
"Hello," Samuel said from halfway across the lab.
Eisley looked up at him. The look in her eyes was inscrutable, but then he'd always found women to be inscrutable. "Hello," she said back. "Olivia Trainor, this is Section Chief Samuel Mosebey of Chimera Detachment. John and Olivia."
She'd told him she would give the cyborg a designation. She'd meant name. He smiled. He locked eyes with the man over their heads as John assessed him as
a friend or foe. He wondered at the criteria on that. It was early days to tell where John the cyborg would fall on that spectrum.
He acknowledged the man, one soldier to another. There was no doubt in his mind the man had a deadly past, even if he couldn't remember it. It was in the muscle memory, and it changed the basic make up of a man, the way he moved, the way he thought.
Thompson walked in behind him because he'd assigned him earlier to escort Miss Trainor. The other man acknowledged his commander with blank eyes. Thompson might never forgive him for his order to use his ability on Eisley. He was starting to think he might never forgive himself. Thompson's touch hurt. It hurt really badly. He hadn't believed Thompson when he'd first told him, not until he'd used it on him.
"Thompson's going to show Miss Trainor to her quarters," he said.
John stood. "Miss Trainor stays with me, until I'm satisfied she won't be harmed."
Eisley tensed.
No way in hell was he going to let a potential threat run around unchecked. The assistant must have sensed the atmosphere in the room getting tense. "I would like to stay close to... John." she looked at the man as she spoke. "You have rooms here that can be secured in the med area, and it's monitored, correct?"
He nodded silently.
"Right. So, I can be on stand by to take care of John should he need medical care. All you’d need to do in emergencies at night is release me, but, in your secured ward, we’re a minimal risk."
Samuel traded looks with Eisley. He didn't agree, until he saw her give a slight nod that it would, in fact, work. It was sound thinking. He'd give this to the little assistant, as long as it turned out she wasn't a threat. If she was a threat, she wouldn't be around long enough to argue about anything.
"All right, Thompson. Settle our guests into med rooms, and ask Star if she has some things Olivia here can use. She'll need a change of clothes." Thompson nodded, but, in no other way, acknowledged his commander. Samuel almost sighed his frustration.