Cyborg

Chapter One

Chapter One

MAX GLITCHED.

A second later he was back, his vision temporarily clouded by a useless downpour of data from his last twelve assignments. A quick shake of his head reset his ocular processor and his eyes once again beheld the scene before him.

Breathtaking, even after so many years.

His internal bio-scan noted that the glitch was the third in as many weeks. He was too busy enjoying the view of the light dappled planet to give a damn. Sitting on Nina Station, orbiting in space above the Consortium planet of Tarni, Max was smaller and grander than anything in the universe. It was in the metal walls of this rotating machine called home that he actually remembered that he was...

Human.

If he ever bothered to open up to his Protocol mandated therapist, she’d tell him that of course he was human. Class Cs were considered human in every system that created them. He’d argue that humans were born, not created in a lab. And shortly thereafter he’d be decommissioned and stripped for parts and left a husk, 63% of the man he used to be.

Such was the life of a Class C human. The life of a cyborg.

But for the moment he didn’t care. Night had fallen over Nina City and the street lights made a dreamlike pattern over the dark land. He could almost imagine fairies dancing, spinning in intoxicating swirls and leading men to their doom.

With a single thought, he wiped the last three hours’ medical data from his memory repository. Due to uplinks when he slept, his monitors already had data on some of his previous glitches. If he was called in for assessment, they’d find more evidence of corruption. But he was hundreds of kilometers away from them for the moment, sitting on a space station, one of the four that orbited Tarni.

On this bit of metal, he was king, or as close to it as any orphaned runaway could hope to rise. In the year since he’d been permanently assigned to Nina Station, he’d grown to love this cramped observation room. None of the travelers coming or going from the planet knew about it, and few staff lasted long enough to appreciate what was little more than a glass bottomed closet.

Some even found it uncomfortable. A corporal who’d transferred back planet-side a few months ago had told him it felt like he was trapped between two worlds: Tarni and the darkness of space. Stuck on a structure that defied the gods and going nowhere.

No wonder Max liked this place. If anything reflected him, it was an old space station that affronted the gods.

The sensor on the door behind him beeped, warning that it was about to open. Max stepped to the side so that his back was to the wall, not the newcomer. With a gentle hiss, light flooded the room and his assistant Xenzi stepped inside, information tablet pasted to her hand and an intent look in her eye. Like many of the other people under Commander Nina’s command, Zi was human.

She’d been raised in Nina City long before it took that name. She was probably around Max’s age at 33, though he’d never asked. Her dark hair was pinned and slicked back in an efficient knot, and her uniform had been pressed, the dark green marking her as one of the station staff. Her brown eyes were wide, but shrewd, and she’d lost color, her mocha skin a little pale from the lack of natural sun. After lasting six months, she was his longest serving second. He didn’t doubt that he’d soon receive her resignation.

Humans weren’t made to straddle the two worlds like this, both Tarni and space close enough to reach but too far to grasp.

She didn’t waste time on niceties, and for that, Max preemptively missed her. “Captain Morvellan has requested to speak with you once again,” she said, her tone clear that ‘request’ meant ‘demand.’ “It appears that another mechanical issue has crept up, preventing his departure.”

Max rested his head in his hand, a gesture of emotion that he’d only make in front of a few trusted crew mates. He sighed. “Should that not be a problem for his engineer?”

Zi scrolled for a moment, then nodded. “His crew came in with no engineer three weeks ago. They’ve hired out some necessary fixes to two outfits aboard the station while making inquiries planet-side.”

“And?” Max doubted true kings dealt with so many customer complaints.

Zi’s lips pulled into a tight line. “He contracted Rufus for half of the work.”

Yes, that would explain the complaint. Max couldn’t name every scam artist and two-credit con man on the ship, but he knew Rufus. “I’ll talk to Morvellan. You have Brudor put in the complaint to the Citadel. He’s one of Droscus’s men so that might actually see something done this time.” Rufus was technically a citizen of Droscus’s territory and, therefore, subject to the general’s punishments.

Zi had the presence of mind not to show the doubt they both felt. “And shall I expedite the new engineer’s paperwork?”

“I thought you said they were just making inquiries.” Though thought was not the proper word. Max’s memory processor kept a 100% accurate account of all short-term memory. He didn’t have the ability to forget. Not unless he did it on purpose.

“That’s what the captain told me. I made some calls of my own. He’s ready to hire someone on land. You know it can takes weeks for the proper paperwork to go through. If I had to guess, he’s about to demand this of you anyway.” If Zi was guessing, Max trusted it. That was her job and she was the best.

It was on the tip of his tongue to ask her when she planned to leave, but he held it back. He couldn’t ask anyone to stay on account of him. Class Cs had an expiration date and his was approaching fast enough.

“I’ll speak to the captain,” he said. “Expedite the paperwork.” He left Zi in the observation deck and made his way to the temporary dock.

Most ships didn’t stay long at Nina Station. Anyone staying longer than a few hours was forced to tether their ship to the station and leave it floating, ready to be retrieved when it was time to leave. At any given time, there might be a dozen tethered ships. And today, Captain Morvellan held the honor of the longest resident of the temporary dock.

Each ship’s crew was assigned quarters in the dock, and the mess near one of the doors made it clear where the Morvellan crew had taken to lounging. Out of courtesy, Max requested permission to enter the captain’s private quarters and was granted it after more than a minute of waiting.

The door slid open to reveal a brightly lit room with cream colored walls and a yellow light hanging from the ceiling. A cot was strapped to one wall and a desk set up against the other. Since this was the captain’s quarters, it came with a small porthole that right now was looking out into the darkness of space.

Morvellan kept the room warm and Max’s internal sensors primed his cooling system to compensate. It wasn’t a conscious action on his part, merely a bit of data that flitted across his brain. There were few parts of his machinery that needed to be triggered on purpose. What was the point of all the technology if it could fail because a man didn’t act?

Max kept his back straight as he surveyed the captain. The man was human and appeared somewhere between forty and fifty, with a slight paunch nearly masked by his bulging muscles. If he were standing, he would have been tall, and two days’ worth of beard grew on his face in patches. Max drew his own conclusions from the captain’s unkempt appearance. Nina Station didn’t have all the amenities of Tarni, but showers and toiletries were easy enough to obtain.

He let the judgments filter out of his mind and turned his thoughts to the matter at hand. “I was told you wished to speak to me.”

The captain didn’t rise from his chair; he simply looked up at Max and squinted. “Yeah, that’s right,” he huffed.

Max waited.

When the captain realized Max wasn’t about to say anything, he blew out a phlegmy breath and spoke. “I’m not happy with any of the s**t you let happen while my crew has been staying here, acting all nice.”

Max didn’t mention the two complaints they’d received about drunken conduct. It wasn’t worth it. “You have my—”

He was cut off when a two meter tall alien with bright green skin and four arms busted through a side door. “Captain, come quick, the robo’s glitching out,” the alien trilled. He was undulating, his body thin and as wavy as a tree branch. While the alien’s head was about the size of a human’s, his neck was twice as long and he had two long antennae protruding from the back of his neck and hanging out over his forehead.

Tronx, his internal computer provided after a moment of scanning the database. He kept his distance. Tronx skin was corrosive to most metals and Max wasn’t about to risk any more corruption to his systems.

When the captain jumped to his feet, panic written across his thick brows, Max realized that robo didn’t mean robot. They were talking about their cyborg. Either the Tronx didn’t know or didn’t care that he’d just thrown the slur out in Max’s presence.

The captain followed the alien and Max silently followed the captain. If something was going wrong with a cyborg, he wanted to be there to help. Otherwise, he couldn’t prevent the bloodshed.

The dark narrow hallway led past the crew bunks and into a storage bay with gray metallic walls and a soaring ceiling. The aroma of blood was thick in the air and the clangs of clashing metal reverberated past Max as he picked up his pace.

He sensed the danger before he saw it, instinct or some integral piece of machinery warning him to duck and slide as he made his way through the final door. The Tronx was laid flat, a sticky blue substance that might have been his blood oozing out of a head wound. Like Max, the captain had dodged the first of the hurtled scraps of metal.

The malfunctioning cyborg couldn’t throw as fast as a bullet, but his projectiles could easily kill. As Max watched the man with a large mechanical attachment for an eye and an arm made of half synthetic polymer, half skin, he knew he wasn’t seeing a glitch. This was a complete and utter meltdown. This cyborg, whoever he’d been before the metal scraped away the last flake of his humanity, had long ago surpassed the limit on synthetic parts that all legitimate cyborg creators clung to.

No, his mind was gone, and all that was left was a killing machine. The crew could die in an instant, and if he got free, this machine could take down the entire station.

So Max had to stop him.

He didn’t worry about the captain or the other crew. He wasn’t here to rescue anyone. His sole purpose was to take out the killing machine ready to wreak havoc across this room and this station. He slid his blaster out of its holster and set the shot to the highest setting. It wouldn’t be fatal even to a human, but with so much exposed metal, it would be possible to short the cyborg out.

With fluid grace, a perfect blend of training and mechanical enhancement, he aimed for the eyepiece on the cyborg’s head and fired three blasts in quick succession, rolling away before any shrapnel could be thrown at him.

As it whizzed by, a jagged edge tore a cut in his face, and Max saw it was spare metal culled from broken down ships. Scrap that was readily available on board to anyone who wanted it.

Max’s shots went wide and he took cover behind a thick wall that reached his hips. He crouched and waited while scrap kept coming. It was too much to hope the cyborg would run out of ammunition before he killed anyone. When the crashes started in the opposite direction, Max took another shot, this time aiming for a metal plate on his back.

His aim was true. The cyborg dropped the metal in his hand, but he didn’t go down. He whirled on Max, eyes wide and nostrils flaring. What had once been a man looked more like a mechanical bull, all rage and wires and thoughtless destruction.

Max’s heartbeat stayed even and his breathing never faltered. A strange moment of serenity dawned as the cyborg charged him faster than any human could run. Max fired off shot after shot, not bothering to move out of the cyborg’s blundering path. The door was too close behind him; if Max didn’t stop the cyborg with his fire, his only option was to physically impede him.

The impact was more powerful than a blast off—they crashed and fell back. Max took a blow to the side of his head, his own machinery whizzing to compensate for any interior damage. His pain dampeners engaged, suppressing the evidence of the injury until he could ignore it completely. It was a risky setting, but either he died from his injuries or he died because he couldn’t fight hard enough.

He’d much rather sacrifice himself.

The cyborg reared back and Max saw the end in his eyes. They’d lost all their color except for a pinprick of black pupil. There was nothing human, nothing conscious within this poor excuse for a being. And there was nothing to save. Once a man glitched this hard, there was no recovery.

The fall jostled Max’s weapon and another blow saw it broken to pieces. Tackled as he was, Max didn’t have the proper leverage to win, but he kept fighting, bucking his hips and punching at the cyborg’s exposed torso.

When the cyborg grabbed another large piece of metal and held it high above his head, Max couldn’t even make himself brace for the impact. His mind didn’t summon any happy memories, only regrets. For a moment, he thought of his few friends and how they’d drifted beyond his reach in the past year, now married and mated and no longer alone.

It was never for me, he thought, his mind working faster than light speed. The cyborg above him looked almost frozen as time seemed to slow. But I would have liked to try it out. He imagined the woman for him, but her face was completely shrouded in shadow, not even a hint of her species.

Her, he thought. Whoever she is, I would have liked my shot.

In a blink, time caught up. The cyborg slumped forward, his arm smacking Max across the nose and the bone crunching as the singeing smell of las fire blasted above him.

Max pushed the dead cyborg off of him and found the Tronx standing with a portable las cannon clutched in two hands, his stance a clear indication that he’d never fired the weapon before. He nodded his thanks to the alien and looked to find the captain hidden in a cubby along the wall, a retractable wall pulled up to shield him.

The captain stepped out, no sign of shame on his face. He’d just run from a fight and let an untrained crewman and a barely known cyborg kill his own man, and he had the temerity to stand straight. Max barely held back his scowl.

“File the paperwork for your new engineer with my assistant,” Max said. The pain suppressors were starting to disengage and the vision in his right eye was fading way too fast. He spoke quickly, worried he’d collapse before he could get to safe harbor. “Zi will see it expedited and you can be on your way before the week is out.”

Morvellan pointed to the steaming pile of dead cyborg. “Now I’ve got to find some muscle since this hunk of metal broke.”

Hunk of metal.

Broke.

Max swallowed back the anger. The nameless cyborg had been a person once and now he was reduced to little more than broken, useless parts. “There are three other space stations orbiting Tarni and another three planets in the system. Find your muscle somewhere else.”

Morvellan gave him an assessing look. “You know how to fight.”

Max turned and left. As a cyborg, his only choice was to keep iron tight control on his temper. One slip and he was on the edge of murder. He walked down the hall with the captain’s words echoing through the still human portions of his brain.

The shadowy woman of regret wasn’t for him. All he had to look forward to was a violent end where no one remembered that he’d once been a man.

Pain shuddered through him and this time, Max welcomed it. Robots couldn’t feel. And this one reminder was all he had. For now.