UNIT 78_RESCUED

  Copyright © 2018 by Mina Carter & Evangeline Anderson

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover: Reese Dante

  *Cover content is for illustrative purposes only. Any person depicted on the cover is a model.*

  Rescued (Unit 78)

  CyBRG Files

  Mina Carter

  Evangeline Anderson

  New York Times & USA Today Bestselling Authors

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Also by Mina Carter

  Also by Evangeline Anderson

  About Mina Carter

  About Evangeline Anderson

  Chapter One

  Humans were shit-scared of rogue cyborgs.

  Unit 78, formerly Corporal Richard Hardgraves, stood silently in the grav-lift, his gaze fixed on the doors in front of him. A unit of marines stood around him, armed to the teeth. They were his “escorts” for his meeting with Admiral Pierce, and they’d met him at the airlock when he’d arrived. Even now he could smell the fear leaching out of their pores.

  He didn’t blame them though. They’d no doubt been fed horror stories about him and his kind. He certainly had when he’d been human. There were tales of early prototypes who had gone on killing sprees, their control subroutines corrupted so they saw anything and everything as a threat—soldiers, civilians, their own kind, random hunks of rock…

  He’d even been called into a hostage situation with one a few years back. A cyborg had taken a base mechanic hostage and had killed the three teams sent in before their superiors had gotten some sense in their heads and called in the expert. AKA Rich. An expert in negotiation and hostage recovery, he’d been at the top of his game.

  It had taken a few hours and bringing in an expert in computer coding to help him understand what was going on in the thing’s metal skull, but they’d finally managed to crack through the cyborg’s subroutine lock and gotten it to release the technician. Unfortunately, the logical reasoning Rich had employed had locked the thing down, rendering it useless as it tried to process out of the loop he’d put it into. He remembered looking at it with pity as it had been hauled off by CyBRG technicians, a hunk of metal and flesh that was once a man, once a soldier. Like him.

  But that cyborg had been nothing like him, nor the rest of his group. The CyBRG program took soldiers killed in action, those who were confirmed as brain-dead, and cyberized them into the ultimate fighting machines. That was the way it was supposed to go, anyway—until an asshole called Pike had seen the potential profit in selling CyBRG units on the black market.

  Supply and demand had meant that Pike needed more fodder for his money-making scheme. A land mine had taken out several teams, including Rich’s. Thanks to conveniently malfunctioning medical equipment, the medical teams hadn’t been able to tell they weren’t brain-dead and had cyberized them anyway on Pike’s orders.

  But cyberizing a body with a live brain was very different from cyberizing one that was brain-dead. For one thing, they didn’t take orders well to kill innocent civilians. Within weeks they’d broken their programming and gone rogue, fighting Pike’s forces to avoid annihilation. Under the command of their leader, Drew Fisher, they’d won. Pike was dead, and rather than admit they’d fucked up majorly, the Space Corps was busy denying their existence completely.

  Until, it seemed, the Corps, or rather one of their admirals, needed something from them. Hence the reason Rich was standing in a lift with a group of marines who had obviously all drawn the short straw. The marine to his left appeared to be muttering the last rites under his breath, and the one on the right was sweating, a bead of perspiration detaching itself from his brow and rolling slowly down the side of his face. Since the temperature was slightly cooler than comfortable for a standard human, he wasn’t hot. He was scared shitless.

  Rich kept his smile to himself and looked straight ahead, playing up the cyborg act for all he was worth. Even among the rogue units, he was heavily cyberized.

  His right arm was all metal, the entire shoulder cradle replaced and armored. One side of his jaw carried visible implants embedded in the skin, smaller units disappearing up into his hairline. Under his form-fitting body armor, similar implants decorated his collarbones, and the lines just inside his hips, down his spine and further down on his legs. They were mounting points for heavier hardware that would integrate with the cybernetics that laced his entire system and turn him into a cyber-organic tank. Under his armor, both legs were gone beneath the knee, replaced with metal.

  All in all, he looked like one scary motherfucker.

  They were right to be afraid of him. He could drop everyone in the lift within 3.87 seconds and not be out of breath. He wouldn’t even need the pulse pistols holstered at his hips to do it. Brute force and speed that no human could comprehend would do the job just as well.

  The lift slowed to a stop and the doors opened. Without waiting for the marines around him, Rich stepped forward, letting them scurry to follow. They appeared to be on the admiralty level of Pierce’s Flagship, the Redoubt, and, by the looks of it, all personnel had been cleared. Like the docking ring and his route up here.

  Obviously Pierce didn’t want people knowing he was dealing with the cyborgs.

  “This way…” One of the marines said and then paused, obviously at a loss for what to call Rich. Not surprising. None of them wore name tags or rank indicators anymore. There was no need. After their…conversion, rank was meaningless. Some of them had become comfortable using their old names, but some had chosen new ones to reflect their new natures.

  “Unit 78,” Rich said, his voice emotionless. Sure, he had a name and used it back home, but these assholes didn’t deserve to know what it was.

  “This way, Unit 78,” the marine replied, his tight expression saying he was uncomfortable with Rich. Tough shit. They had called for help, so they could just suck it up.

  He was led down the corridor and into a conference room. Ignoring the chair that had been offered to him, Rich stood motionless in the middle of the room and studied his environment without appearing to. It was swish, with deep, plush carpets, heavy wooden furniture and actual art on the walls. He had no idea who the artists were, but his ocular implants easily picked up that the works were real and finely done. No doubt they’d cost a fortune. The whole place was a far cry from the environments he’d been used to as a member of the Marine Corps.

  How the other half lived…

  “Ahh, it’s here.”

  The comment preceded the arrival of Admiral Brock Pierce through an open door opposite the one Rich had arrived through. He had a glimpse of a similarly plush lounge before it swooshed shut behind the medal and braid bedecked admiral.

  Idly, his onboard processor noted and listed what each decoration was for, in a scrolling list overlaid on top of the vision in his left eye. It was an impressive list. The admiral had seen action in all the major engagements in the last half century.

  However, his active uplink to the ship’s mainframe also informed him that while the admiral had technically seen action in all those battles, that was
it. He’d watched them from forward operating bases or from orbit. Never once had he actually stepped onto a battlefield. Another quick, but deeper, scan revealed the reason why.

  Pierce’s father had been an admiral too… and had made sure his son was never in any danger whatsoever.

  “You didn’t disarm it?” Pierce asked suddenly, his gaze cutting from the pistols holstered at Rich’s hips to the marine commander.

  “Such an action would be pointless,” Rich commented bluntly. “I do not need any weapons to kill everyone aboard this ship.”

  To prove his point, he sent a command through the uplink. The lights in the room dimmed, replaced by flashing red as the alarm klaxons started to sound. Before any of the men in the room with him could react, the big cyborg cut the alarm. He’d made his point. If he could trigger a red alert without speaking, he could also trigger the ship to self-destruct.

  “Our aid was requested.” Rich looked down to meet the shorter man’s gaze, making sure to keep all the emotion out of his eyes. They believed him to be a killing machine, like the rest of his group. Since their ferocious reputation was all that kept every chancer and bounty hunter in the galaxy from coming after them, he needed to make sure this lot stayed terrified of him. And that included the good admiral here. “You require your daughter recovered from a cult?”

  The reminder seemed to bring Pierce back to the present and he shuddered, his shoulders slumping for a moment and a haunted expression entering his eyes. Rich hadn’t liked the guy on sight, but that little sign of humanity, there for a fraction of a second before he shuttered his expression, gave him an insight into the admiral’s mind. Whatever else he was, he obviously cared about his daughter.

  “Yes…”

  He nodded to the marines, who all fell back to the edges of the room. Apparently, despite Rich proving he didn’t need to be in the same room to kill him, Pierce didn’t trust him not to kill the admiral with his bare hands.

  He suppressed a sigh and focused on the holographic display that lit up in the center of the console table.

  “This is Beacon Five,” Peirce said, waving his hand at a star-map that appeared of a small system. It zoomed in on one of the planets in a small cluster. Blue and green, it was terran norm and looked perfect for human life. “A T-5 class colony planet that has been largely unproblematic since it was first colonized. Until the Intergalactic Peace Keeping Association—IPKA—was called in to mediate a dispute of unknown origin.”

  Rich nodded, keeping his expression impassive. So far everything Pierce said seemed normal, nothing that would be cause for concern. But something must have gone tits up for him to call in the dreaded rogue cyborgs.

  “Unknown to IPKA, or us, the Tr’Low Breeding Cult had managed to establish a presence on the planet a few years ago, and last year they took it over.”

  Rich’s only reaction was to blink as he used the uplink with the ship to mine the Corps’ database for information on the cult. It took less than a second and his jaw tightened in fury.

  The Tr’Low were, in a word, fanatical assholes. They followed the teachings of a Father Tr’Ayer, and their goal was to spread the “breeding wisdom” of their god Tr’Low across the galaxy. Their methods were questionable at best and outright illegal at worst. Kidnapping was the least of it. They took young women, pumped them full of a cocktail of drugs, and then bred them with specially selected males of good genetic stock, also drugged.

  A quick glance at the compounds that had been found in a female dumped by the Tr’Low after she hadn’t survived one of their breeding ceremonies made him shudder internally. If the men were injected with something similar, it wouldn’t be a pleasant experience for the female. It would be akin to being raped by a Neanderthal high on Rush, one of the most potent stimulants in the galaxy.

  “And?” Rich prompted, his investigations taking less than a couple of heartbeats.

  “IPKA sent the Tranquility, my daughter’s ship, to Beacon Five to mediate a conflict. It stopped transmitting to IPKA headquarters shortly after arrival. Even the black box isn’t responding to pings.”

  At that Rich did pause. If the black box was no longer responding, the ship had taken heavy damage or was destroyed. Intergalactic Peace Keeping Association ships were all highly distinctive and were given free passage throughout the galaxy. No one interfered with them, ever. They could fly through the harshest space battle or right into the roughest frontier town where most inhabitants would sell their own mothers for body parts and not have a thing or person lifted from their ships. Everyone respected them. They could probably even walk into the Cyborgs’ own base without issue and talk.

  Because that’s what they did. They talked. They mediated. They were neutral, and no one offered them harm.

  Until the Tr’Low. The fact that they’d taken an IPKA ship hostage was enough to have every single combat capable force in the galaxy on their tails, but Peirce hadn’t done that.

  He’d called in Cyborgs—why?

  Rich turned to study the smaller man, his gaze narrowing. “What aren’t you telling me?”

  Admiral Pierce sighed and ran a hand through his thinning hair. He looked around the room at the marine guards stationed at intervals and appeared to make a decision.

  “All right,” he growled, “everybody out. I want the room.”

  “Admiral?” The captain of the guards looked surprised. “Excuse me, sir, but is that safe?”

  “I said get out!” the admiral snapped. “Now or I’ll have the lot of you court-martialed for insubordination.”

  That got them moving, Rich saw with amusement he didn’t allow to show on his face. Instead he kept his features completely impassive while the marines cleared the room. When the plush conference room contained only him and the admiral, he took a step forward and repeated his question.

  “What aren’t you telling me? Why do you want me—a cyborg—going after your daughter? Is it because of my background in hostage negotiation and extraction?”

  “That’s the reason your captain recommended you for this assignment when I first made contact with your… er, crew,” Admiral Pierce admitted. “But there is a reason I need a cyborg on this. You see, our intelligence officers weren’t able to penetrate into the…the Breeding Compound where my daughter is being held captive.” He seemed to be having a hard time getting the words out. “But they were able to find out why the Tr’Lows want her so badly. And…” He swallowed hard. “And what they expect to do with her.”

  If she was in a Breeding Compound and their entire religion centered around breeding, then one guess what they’re fucking going to do to her, Rich thought dryly. But he didn’t speak his thought out loud. The pain in Admiral Pierce’s face stopped him. This wasn’t just one of the Top Brass handing out an assignment. This was a father in pain when he thought of what was being done to his daughter—his little girl. Now wasn’t the time for levity, no matter what Rich might think of the man.

  “Why do they want her?” he asked instead. “Does it have anything to do with the reason you want me?”

  “It does.” The admiral nodded. “The Tr’Lows have a kind of…prophecy—a foretelling that has apparently been passed down through their ranks for generations. It has to do with a special child who will be bred—one with red hair and eyes like the sky.” He looked hard at Rich. “My daughter has red hair and I can’t help noticing you’ve got the palest blue eyes I’ve ever seen. You look like a goddamn Husky from Old Earth.”

  Rich shrugged.

  “Yes, but there are other men—human men—who have blue eyes. You still haven’t told me why I’m here.”

  “You’re here because the other part of the prophecy says the father of this miracle child they hope to breed will be ‘half man and half metal.’” He grimaced unhappily. “Are you beginning to get the picture?”

  Rich stared at the other man.

  “So…you think they’ll be more likely to accept me into their cult because of my cyborg status?” That w
ould certainly be a first. Usually the fact that he was half machine spooked people. A group that might want him because of his machine half was an intriguing thought.

  Yeah, they want you just the way you are. Too bad they’re a group of murderous cult members, muttered a sardonic little voice in his head.

  “Exactly.” The admiral gave a curt nod.

  “And…they’ll take me in because they want me to breed your daughter and father this…super baby on her?” Rich went on, making sure he was understanding correctly.

  Admiral Pierce’s face went red.

  “Don’t misunderstand your assignment, cyborg.” He spat the word as though it was a curse. “You’re going in to rescue my daughter and that’s it. If you so much as lay a single metal finger on her—”

  “Understood,” Rich said, cutting him off. “You don’t want anyone touching your daughter sexually.”

  “No, I fucking don’t.” Pierce looked so angry now Rich thought his head might explode. “Especially not a metal monster of an abomination like you.”

  Rich frowned.

  “Your words are unnecessary. In my current state, I doubt a human woman would be in any way attracted to me. And I do not care to engage sexually with a female who does not want me.”

  He deliberately kept his words cold, his tone mechanical. He buried the pain and shame of what he was saying under a layer of artificial frost—letting his metal half take over so his human half could stay the fuck out of it. But even so, the truth hurt—a hell of a lot. Why would a human woman want to be with him as he was now?

  Of course, Doc Chambers had been able to see past Drew’s cyborg half and love him, but that was different—she was used to working with cyborgs—used to men who were half machine. It didn’t faze her because it was her life’s work. But to a normal human woman who had never even seen a cyborg before, he would look like a fucking monster. There was no doubt about that.