1
"Move, Rhimodian," snarled the Terran guard.
Kolvin twisted around and started to climb out of the bunk from his cell. His body ached, as it did every day. If his internal sensors were working and not being jammed, he would have detected that he was hungry as well.
Unfortunately, all he had was the rumbles of his stomach. Stuck in a Terran Empire prison, his cybernetics signals were blocked from any kind of transmissions and connection to the Rhimodian community. Left to deal with his primal side, the natural Rhimodian in him had begun becoming more dominant as well as the other cyborgs who had been taken captive.
They had survived the last five years in this dark and dingy metal prison. The only places with light were the medical bays where the experiments were done--and not even those were very bright. Just illuminated enough to show how unkempt the ship was.
Prisoners were not given luxury accommodations.
Kolvin, like his fellow mates, had to draw on older, more primitive pieces of themselves to survive.
Kolvin stood, and the Terran guard may have only come to his shoulder, but the stun stick in his hand made up for the difference in size.
And the guards here were liberal with delivering punishment for anyone who dared to defy them.
"What now?" Kolvin asked.
"Are you deaf, robot? Do you need your ears reprogrammed?"
"This is not routine," Kolvin said.
The guards would not be greeting them for another three standard hours. This should be their recuperation cycle. They didn't get a great deal of rest time, but it seemed to remain regular.
He concluded that if they woke him early, there must be something going on.
"Well, we like to shake things up," the guard said and shoved him forward. His feet slapped on the rough and cold metal floor.
He saw that he was not the only Rhimodian awoken and shoved out of his cell. Others who had been captured along with him were being herded out of their cells as well.
"What do you want now?" Marcin, another Rhimodian in his unit, demanded from a few cells away.
"Get in line," the guard said and slammed him in the shoulder.
Kolvin gritted his teeth as Marcin was hit again.
"Move!" the guard behind Kolvin said.
It was his turn to be struck.
Fourteen thousand eight hundred and seven.
The number of times he'd been hit since being brought to this prison five standard years ago.
"Get going. We haven't got all day."
Another strike.
Fourteen thousand eight hundred and eight.
He shouldn't care how many times, but he kept counting it. Kept it logged in his memories. Along with everything else that had been done. Every poke, every slice, every attack on his person. The number of times they tried to remove his lysteel gauntlets. The scars on his arms were evident of all the attempts by the Terran Empire to remove the tech to learn how it worked.
They were never able to remove them.
But not after many hours of trying.
It wasn't the only procedure that was performed on him and his fellow Rhimodians. Genetic code extraction and testing. Some had not survived, but the Terrans determined quickly that the Rhimodian tech died with the cyborg, so they quit killing them. Then they just performed their experiments on live cyborgs.
