Chapter One
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this mission,” Johnson VH571 muttered to no one in particular as the ship began to buck upon entering the atmosphere of the planet below them.
Amaryllis VH600’s gut clenched reflexively at the comment. She’d been having bad vibes from the moment she and her partner had joined the mission in progress at the TM20 way station. The company had indicated that the assignment would be a ‘piece of cake’, but they had a way of understating most of the operations they sent their hunters out on.
This one stank of disaster waiting to happen and she doubted that she and Johnson were the only ones to think so.
To be completely fair, though, therewerea number of factors that could account for the sense of impending doom that had nothing to do with precognition or even logical assumptions based on previous operations.
She was a seasoned soldier. She’d been on almost a dozen missions, most of them complete successes, but she still had pre-battle jitters every time she participated in a new operation, and this one promised to be something major, unlike any undertaking she’d taken part in before. That was enough to make her uneasy in and of itself.
Beyond that, the story Robotics, Inc. had cooked up reeked of fabrication, and not just because their main objective was to capture one of their own--if possible--and eliminate her if necessary.
Dalia VH570 was one of their best cyborg hunters. It not only didn’t make sense that she’d gone rogue and joined ‘the enemy’--why would a human join forces with machines?--but, assuming the company wasn’t lying and she had, why the order to capture her if possible? What made her more important than the rogues themselves, important enough to put together three squads of hunters in such a haphazard, poorly planned mission?
Because misery was almost certainly one of the reasons everyone, including her, was so antsy. Discomfort went with the territory. As a soldier, she’d endured her share of it, but she wasn’t accustomed to being packed into a vessel designed for eight with sixteen other hunters like a food cube in a package of vacuum sealed rations.
According to Robotics, Inc., the break in security had been unanticipated, which explained to an extent why they hadn’t had a lot of time for preparations. The cyborgs, who’d either captured Dalia, or snatched her from beneath the company’s nose, were traveling in a short range racer and she supposed it only made sense to launch a chase in similar crafts, built for speed rather than distance and capacity.
Contrary to all logic, however, the cyborgs had gone deep space and they’d had, perforce, to follow or risk losing sight of the quarry all together.
The end result had been three days of very little food, water, or sleep and she, for one, was cranky with the lack of all three. With so many of them packed into one small craft, they’d had to rotate use of the two small cabins the ship boasted--which meant she’d had a grand total of twelve hours rest in the last seventy two hours--and almost nothing to eat or drink since they had no idea of how long the rations would have to last.
There was yet another reason for the sense of impending disaster that had nothing to do with the mission, and he was sitting right beside her, but, as always, Amaryllis did her best not to think about her partner, Reese, if she could help it. As long as she didn’t think aboutwhyhe could spell disaster for her, she figured she had a better chance of not falling in with the fantasies that could ruin her career and quite possibly lead to a good bit of jail time if the bastards that ran Robotics, Inc. were vindictive enough to pursue it.
She had a feeling they were.
Dismissing those thoughts with an effort, Amaryllis focused on the puzzle of their mission.
The army Robotics, Inc. had built, the hunters, had been tracking and ‘decommissioning’ rogue cyborgs for years now. As far as she knew, though, there’d never been a concerted assault like the one they currently faced … which bore the earmarks of an all out war. In general, cyborgs traveled alone, occasionally in pairs. That was the reason she and the other hunters usually worked alone or were sometimes partnered with one or two other hunters, depending on the circumstances--there were a lot of rogues to eliminate and the entire confederation of systems to hide in and she’d spent far more time hunting than battling.
What were the odds, she wondered, that a whole nest of them was about to fall right in their laps?
She didn’t buy it, whatever the company said. The cyborgs might be emotionally unstable due to faulty programming, but there was nothing wrong with their logic circuits. They rarely made mistakes, and certainly not of this magnitude.
Robotics, Inc., on the other hand, had a bad habit of making stupid mistakes.
Building the cyborgs in the first place was the most notable one. They just couldn’t resist playing God. They’d cornered the market with their advances in robotics and robotically enhanced bio-genetic organs, but that only seemed to have whetted their appetite for more glory. The rogues were the first--ever--marriage of robotics and bio-engineering to produce human-like cybernetic organisms--for what true purpose one could only imagine--but they’d succeeded beyond their wildest dreams and failed abysmally at the same time because, like the monster in the classic horror tale, their creation had turned on them. The cyborgs had been so real, so ‘life like’ that, according to Robotics, Inc., they’d begun to believe it themselves. Unfortunately, that belief had clashed with their programming and made them dangerously unstable.
The hunter unit, of which she was a member, had been formed after their rebellion and escape to track these dangerous rogue cyborgs down and destroy them.
Why, and for that matter, how, after all this time, had the cyborgs decided to unite and oppose Robotics, Inc. in force when they’d been behaving up until now as one might expect, erratically and irrationally?
And why would Dalia, one of their own, one of their best, have ‘turned’?
That part didn’t make any sense at all. A few of the hunters seemed just a tad overzealous to her, a little on the fanatical side when it came to the cyborgs. For her part, she couldn’t say that she despised them--they were machines, after all--and she thought she was probably typical of most hunters--doing her job, not actually sympathetic to the cyborgs but not particularly rabid either. Sympathy was the key word though, and she didn’t see how one of their own could go from hunter to rogue sympathizer at the drop of a hat, particularly not Dalia, who supposedly had.
Even if she accepted that, which she didn’t, why would the cyborgs consider Dalia important enough to take such a risk as to land right in Robotics, Inc.’s backyard to pick her up? Then, having done something so uncharacteristically stupid, they’d so far forgotten themselves as to be completely unaware of being followed? Leading them back to their stronghold?
The flip side was the possibility that Dalia had been captured by the cyborgs, but that supposition took her nowhere either since she couldn’t come up with a ‘why and how’ that made any sense.
She considered herself a good soldier, but she didn’t like flying blindly into a situation that she didn’t understand.
The bucking of the ship finally subsided as they entered the atmosphere and Amaryllis glanced at the soldier beside her, wondering what Reese thought about the situation. Typically, he appeared completely unruffled either by the impending battle or the teeth rattling jolting they’d just been through.
Irritation flitted through her.
It was all very well to be cool under fire, but Reese was just a little too unflappable to suit her. For her part, she’d have felt better about working with him if she’d seen a hint of uneasiness in his cold blue eyes occasionally, a touch of doubt--maybe a little lust when he gave her one of those thorough once-overs he was prone to when he thought she wouldn’t notice--anything that indicated he wasn’t the next thing to a frigging cyborg himself.
