“A Cyborg employed by the EPED.”
“Damn. We never stood a chance.”
“No,” Gunner agreed.
“You swear you won’t kill us?” the last one asked.
Gunner’s face hardened as he pinned him with his eyes. “I will if you betray me.”
“What do we do now?”
Gunner turned and stormed past them, making a beeline for the elevator. “Whatever the fuck you want.”
They called after him. He heard the click of a gun.Shoot me in the back, I dare you.But it never came.
“That’s it?”
“Be ready,” he said.
***
HE RODE THE ELEVATORdown the shaft, leaning up against the wall. The blood that had coated the floor earlier had dried into a rusty smear at his feet. The ride couldn’t go fast enough. He hated large ships.
His was small, compact, and airtight. There wasn’t a place he couldn’t get to in less than five minutes. His ship was a god amongst ships, and his AI, APOLLO, was named for it. The Greek god of the sun. Speed. Light. His jackal hated the confinement but his other half loved it. He couldn’t please every part of himself all the time. That war, the war in his head, never ended.
Gunner dug another bullet out of his thigh as he waited, pinching the metal between his fingers until it flattened into a disc.
From the moment he opened his eyes, introduced to life for the first time, the two halves of his soul had been at odds. Staring out from inside a clear, crystalline vat, he warred. Sometimes he thought the only reason he didn’t go mad were the codes that denied it.
I got close.
So fucking close.
It had been its own kind of madness, when his logical side faltered and his animal took over completely. He had become the god Anubis reincarnated, with slitted red eyes and long pointed ears only bested in splendor by the points of his canines. He had set a Trentian planet ablaze, single-handedly taking control of one of their main bastions.
Gliese hadn’t always been ruled by humans. Not before he came along. And even now, after forty-eight years, portions of the planet remained uninhabitable.
The elevator door zipped open and Gunner narrowed his eyes.The bodies have been moved.He stepped out cautiously, scanning the area around him, his nostrils flaring and filling with new and familiar scents.
Ely.He shuddered and stormed past the corpses without another glance, pulling a gun from his strap. Her smell was thicker than it should’ve been. It drew him like a dog on a leash. A tether. The wracking pulses from the nanobots still coursed through him, but they were getting weaker and he ignored them.
There.The brig. The door was half-closed and the lights within the room were off.Voices.They were muffled.
Gunner inhaled again. Elodie. The prisoners. The decaying scents of the guards. Kallan. Even a lingering twinge of Royce. And others...
He rushed the door and slammed the panels the rest of the way open, breaking the metal without care.
“Ely,” he roared, already sensing her gone. The darkness hit him just as he switched to night vision. “Where is she?”
Gunner went to their cells but she wasn’t inside. Her door was open. “Where!?” His voice thundered.
The remaining prisoners scurried and rose as the reek of fear took hold. His own.
“She?” one man asked in puzzlement.
“She was taken out of here,” the man in the cell across from hers spoke up. Gunner didn’t turn around, his eyes burning a hole in the spot where he last saw her. Where he left her. Her safe place next to him at the bars.
“When?”
