The Cyborg Bounty Hunter: In the Stars Romance

by Miranda Martin

  It’s easier to give up on that shitty idea when I remind myself that I probably wouldn’t get a read, anyway. Inside that gorgeous head of his, a fortress-like defense mechanism reigns. I should know. I failed miserably every time I tried, which was way too many times, ever since he took me captive. It occurs to me that I don’t think of myself as an unwilling participant in all of this anymore, a development that comes as a surprise.

  I flush slightly with the encore of that magnetism between us. It’s mixed with confusion and gratitude, too. The way he rushed to my rescue when those hellish AI automatons had come for us was perfectly valiant.

  But it’s not as if there’s nothing else. I can’t isolate any one of his actions in the hopes that I can dissect it and make sense of it like a cipher just waiting for the right password to crack. There are too many conflicting and overlapping considerations to factor in.

  His muscular body jumping into the action, fierce and exacting. It’s a rush to lose myself in reliving those moments, remembering them with higher stakes and a greater sense of foreboding than I had felt as everything went down.

  Unfortunately, some of those AI minions are hot on our heels again. I sense their stir to life as they reboot.

  Cole freezes in place, his spine stiffening. He grimaces.

  “What?” I say impatiently, hoping there isn’t a second fire I need to put out before I deal with the machine zombies.

  “Donner’s men. My facial recognition implementation can’t get an accurate read because their features were partially covered. Nevertheless, I just got a ping. Two possible matches.”

  Shit.

  How am I to deal with them deftly and quietly if Cole is aware of their imminent presence, too? If my alerts could blare in colors like a techno-synesthesia, they would be pulsating red all around us. I try to figure out what to do. How to proceed.

  “They’re coming again,” Cole whispers.

  Fear takes up residence in the pit of my stomach. He flicks his gaze backward, letting go of my shoulders so he can be ready to meet them head-on.

  I dredge up the focus to connect with their circuits and disable them again in one fell swoop, the consequences of pulling such a move be damned. If Donner ever gets his hands on any footage or intel about the trick I just pulled, I will have hell to pay. Somehow, in all the years of serving him through my drug-induced state, he missed the finer points of my neuratelepathy, like the pinpoint accuracy I can command even from a distance. I hope he doesn’t put two and two together when he remotely activates them and summons them back.

  There’s a more pressing concern right now, though: the way that Cole looks at me, curiosity intermingled with apprehension. I tried to be stealthy, I really did, but that knowledge does nothing to dispel the growing shame and anxiety in me.

  I feel exposed. There are no words that can make it less of a blatant mystery or that can shield me from having to give away my secrets. I don’t need to access Cole’s systems or circuits to know the shape and tenor of the thoughts going through his mind. I can see it plain as day in his face, the re-examination of our victory. It’s odd enough to have such an unusual turn of events, with a small army lashing out at us and then descending to a system slumber out of nowhere. I could allege a thousand different improbable but not impossible events for that.

  Okay, so a thousand is a reach. But at least one or two.

  Now, prevailing over a couple of Donner’s expensive, bipedal tech when we aren’t in close range?

  Yeah, he’s definitely wondering what my part was in that.

  13 Cole

  “Thank you,” I say as I grab the bag of food sitting atop the counter, despite his being unable to understand me. His translation chip is broken.

  The cook nods with a smile. It’s a wide and spiked grin, filled with a myriad of colors.

  The plastic packaging crinkles in my tight grip as I lead us out of the tier. The air is tense. I know when we cross that threshold and enter my vessel, something will need to be said. What exactly that thing is, I’m not sure. I have a lot of questions, but none of them seem very important at the moment. I’m more concerned with getting her back safe and uninjured.

  We traverse the parking tier in silence until we reach my ship. She slips inside. Her arms wrap tightly around herself in response to the absence of my touch on her lower back. At least that’s what I tell myself. Lily curls into a chair opposite the folding table. She pulls it out and snaps it in place, waiting patiently for her food. Her wig is hanging lopsided atop her head, and there’s a light tear in her shirt where the shoulder meets the sleeve. The synthetic threads tumble down her arm, looping in circles.

  I drop the bag on the metal table. Steam immediately blurs the reflective surface. With a sigh, I slump down against the wall across from her. Our eyes lock as I lean back, relieved for a moment’s rest. But she averts her gaze before I have a chance to get a solid reading of what she’s feeling. Does she feel our bond too? Does she know we’re linked, and that I can feel her emotions just as deeply as she does?

  I want to pull her into my arms and assure her everything is all right, and that I still stand by my promise to protect her. I have half a mind to fire up the engines now and blast out of Temis. Steering us wherever her heart desires as long as it means she’ll be safe. I would surf through the entire universe if it meant keeping Donner and his drones away from her.

  My chest feels heavy, and it isn’t because of the Syntax-Metal arm resting on it. As much as I want to leave Temis with her now, I know it’s not the answer. It wouldn’t mend our circumstances. It would just be running away from our problems and digging ourselves deeper in our own personal problems. Not to mention, I still have a duty to the galactic empire that I can’t exactly throw away. It wouldn’t be honorable to just turn on my vows. If she’s going to have any chance at being free, we need to take Donner down here, at Temis Station.

  But how the hell am I supposed to do that without bringing her into harm’s way? This duality of wanting to protect her, while also wanting to use her to reel in Donner is beginning to eat at me from the inside out. I needed to make a decision—either protect her or catch Donner. My metal hand tightens into a fist. Why can’t I have both? There must be way. I just need to figure it out.

  “Are you going to open the bag?” she asks. “Or shall I just dive in?”

  “Yeah, sorry.” I fumble over myself, unwrapping the covering and placing her meal before her.

  “Thank you,” she practically whispers with the smallest of smiles.

  It’s enough to send my heart flying into space. Her glimmer of warmth and contentment spread through me, and I hold onto that sense of satisfaction.

  I’ve never been touched by someone’s emotions quite like I am by hers. I can’t help but think it’s because of how … special I’m beginning to realize she is.

  Strong neurapaths tend to be a rare breed and always somehow end up being very valuable to the wrong sort of people. This would probably explain why Donner is after her. Hell, after what I just witnessed, even the patrols would outfit her with a regulator to prevent her misuse of her own gifts.

  “Not eating?” she asks as she spoons Royal Temis soup in her mouth—a tasty mixture of cheap ingredients and a marketable name.

  “Yes, I am.” I retrieve my own tray and canister of soup as I watch her devour the meal before her. “Have you always been able to do that? What you did back there with the AI?”

  She eyes me, uninterested in my question and returns to eating in silence.

  I’ve never seen anything like it before in my life. There’s no way Donner didn’t take advantage of that gift. He has zero respect for life and sees others as tools to better his bank account.

  How many laws had he forced her to break? How many life-forms had she hurt with her abilities? It makes my stomach sick to even fathom all the harm and destruction she might have caused. Did she help him destroy planets like mine? Did she displace and kill countless masses?
<
br />   But that’s not fair. It’s not as though she did all of those things on her own accord … I hope. A life like hers, I imagine, is weighted with forced-concealment, ever-present awareness of the edge, and complete objectification. How many years she’s spent with that yoke upon her shoulders—I could never know for sure.

  Lily clears her throat, and it pulls my attention from my deep-tunneled thoughts. “To answer your question, if you’re still interested—I’ve always been able to do that. Well, at least that’s what my earliest memories show me. I can’t think of a time in my life when I didn’t know I was a neurapath.” Her heart rate maintains a steady beat as she talks. She’s not nervous or afraid to share these intimate details with me. “It’s because of my extended reach. When neurapaths are infants, they often can’t tap into anything more than a few centimeters away. That’s why they tend to be discovered at later ages. I, on the other hand, could touch things meters away. As I grew, so did my reach.”

  “That’s impressive.” It’s the only thing I can think to say, because frankly, I’m in awe of her. And it has my tongue tied into knots.

  The comment makes her bristle. “It’s the reason Donner chose me and forced me into employment. The things he’s asked me to do … I’m not a good person.”

  “I think the correct term here is slavery,” I add.

  She shrugs. “You can call it whatever you want, but it doesn’t change what’s happened.” Her back straightens, and her fingers drop to the hem of her shirt. She lifts the fabric in a careful pull, not wanting to disturb the bandage. In the center of the gauze is a bright red stain. It must have opened during our encounter. “This wound,” she begins, “is from the tracker Donner stuck in me that time-released narcotics that I never wanted in my body. He did it to get me addicted, so I wouldn’t take it out and run.”

  The thought sparks my anger. How could someone do that to another being? How could he torture someone without a shred of guilt? The situation’s disgusting. “I’m glad you got away.” I place my hand atop hers, but she withdraws it. Her fingers wrap around the enhanced-tin fork, and she takes small bites from her tray.

  “Well, he’s here in Temis, so I haven’t exactly gotten away, have I?” Her tone is biting.

  I swallow hard. “No, you haven’t.” It’s a bleak outlook, and one I wouldn’t normally side with, but I wasn’t about to invalidate her opinion. Donner is a master at gaslighting his victims to make them pliable—easier to manipulate and exploit. The last thing she needs is for me to tell her how to think, and why her view is wrong.

  “The withdrawals from the drugs he put in my body broke me. My stomach twisted into knots, and I spewed black bile for days. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I laid in pain for weeks, feeling as though I had earth ants crawling along my skin. A never-ending throbbing beat in my head, blurring my vision and slurring my speech.” She forks a chunk of bioengineered meat into her mouth. “I’m surprised I’m still alive. Every day feels like borrowed time.”

  I’m torn. She’s admitted to being a criminal and hurting innocents, but she was coerced. Even though I don’t know Lily very well, I find it hard to believe that she would have committed any wrongdoing without Donner. She was the puppet, and he was the puppet master. He surgically inserted narcotics into her body to make her do as he told her to.

  My throat tightens as the fury builds in me. It take conscious effort to breathe again. My hand balls into a fist so tightly, the knuckles turn a pale gray shade. I would rip that bipedal parasite apart with my teeth if I had the chance. And my ancestors applaud the thought.

  “It’s obvious we have a common enemy here.” Her eyes jump across my face and sweep down my body. She doesn’t need to use to her neuratelepathy to know I’m pissed off. “Due to our run-in with his minions, I can probably track the AI now.” Her heart rate raises, and her synapses begin firing more rapidly. She’s about to launch something on me. “And I know you want Donner bad. Don’t even try to deny it.”

  “I never have,” I say, leaning forward. I’m eager to see what move she’s gearing up for.

  “I’ll help you find him, but I won’t play the role of your decoy.” She practically spits that last word. “I don’t want to be trapped in this galactic law bullshit anymore.”

  I pounce on the offer. “Deal.”

  She nods. “All right then.”

  “I was almost past my time limit to hold you anyway.” And this is going to be perfect arrangement, a salvation from my battling thoughts. With her able to hunt down Donner’s AI, I won’t have to put her in danger and I’ll still take the fucking bastard down.

  14 Lily

  There are no more heart-racing adventures, or brushes with danger, or near-death experiences. Not for a while, anyway. Not for the next twelve hours, which is a record ever since I set foot on this station or, to go back even further in the past, ever since Donner waltzed into my life. Imagining him dancing, my former master—ugh, what a disgusting word—almost puts a smile on my face because it would be so out of character for him. Of all the things I can do with my gift, making Donner dance like a marionette would be a trick worth its weight in Arorium bank notes.

  Instead, what we have is a low-key recon mission. Intelligence gathering. Those were never my strong suit, but with Cole taking the lead, they are not so bad. We go through dozens of colorful personalities ranging from patrols passing through during a shift change, lounge-flies loitering about, and even informants wanting their palms greased. Hell, two of the collection of dutiful information providers we source our framework from are servicepersons.

  For this first time since I arrived in Temis, the station is finally coming alive to me.

  That’s to say nothing of Cole. The easy banter he levies at our mission targets and the effortless charm that springs eternal in him is catnip. He’s warm, flashing a familiar smile to those I can tell know him from previous visits. Some even reference favors he performed for them in the past and outstanding debts they have with him. Not as mercenary as I first assumed he was, Cole barely acknowledges their concessions, simply nodding and moving along. His method of extracting valuable details is benign, a pickpocket lifting bits of treasure one ounce at a time.

  In other words, his approach is aslant, conscious of the fact that once we leave this place, someone connected with Donner or Blake or any other high-level operative with ties to that community will discreetly retrace our steps to reverse engineer our process.

  After revealing to him the truth about my abilities, we came together to outline a plan. I had my doubts about its viability because so much of it hinges on Cole’s congeniality. Watching him joking and being, you know, modest about it erased any questions swirling in my mind.

  Cole is in the thick of his latest exchange, this time with a short, amiable-looking droid. A redux, by the looks of the patches on his bare torso. His movement isn’t fluid and there are glitches and lags in his speech, but otherwise, he proves to be a fruitful source.

  After five more moments of furtive, oblique references to this or that, Cole straightens his back and juts his chin out at the droid. The latter, in turn, mirrors Cole’s gestures back at him and then saunters off, zipping by in an occasional zig zag before we lose him in the crowd.

  “Who was that?” I whisper as soon as Cole and I are walking at our usual fast pace, heading over to the hyperdocks.

  “Nap,” Cole replies simply.

  “Huh?”

  “Oh, just someone I used to know from around here.”

  I want to ask him more, but then I spot a solitary quick-heat dispensary up ahead. My stomach grumbles, and I decide it’s time for me to take a little break to grab some grub. I scan open comms as I make a beeline in the machine’s general direction, alert and tuned in for any mention of Donner’s infamous AI. There has not been a peep since their sudden re-animation last night, but you can never be too sure.

  The dispensary lights up as I step in its vicinity, its sudden rousing, blinking lig
hts beckoning me closer.

  A muted, almost imperceptible transmission registers on my comms. I stop in the crowd to listen, the rest of the passersby milling around me with the faint murmur of the normal, day-to-day activity.

  “What is it?” Cole asks.

  I swat at him, hoping he’ll stay quiet so I can make out the message making its way to the AI’s circuits. “Hm.”

  “What?” Cole’s face is scrunched up, his robotic arm drumming against his legs. Impatient.

  It was nearly enough to make me want to tease him a little bit more. Make him wait for it. But no, that won’t do. Abandoning my plan of fetching some food, I spin on my heels and march back in the direction from which we came.

  “Hey!” Cole chased after me. “What are you doing?”

  “We need to get back to the rig,” I say, shooting him a look I hope is imbued with the right subtext.

  Cole nods curtly, and off we go, tracking back to our shared living space. I can’t tell him about the transmission with so many people around us. Who knows how many incognitos lurk? Donner always provides for at least three lines of defenses, and in this station, I have no contacts I can target to gather more information. That’s why we are depending on what little we glean from unsuspecting characters from Cole’s past.

  An earnest, adrenaline-filled tingle runs down my spine. Finally, some action.

  As soon as we cross the holding bay and move past the door leading to the room that Cole trapped me in during our first serious interaction, I start to give him the rundown. “The AI just added the Blue Borealis to the scheduler.” I smile, pleased with myself. “I picked up on the transmission from a mile out. It’s good.”

  A slow, easy smile spreads over Cole’s lips. “Good. Good. And I know just the person to go to for access-passes.”

  My face falls. “Wait, that’s not an area you can get to with your own pass?”