Zero's Heart (Lathar Mercenaries: Warborne Book 1) Read online

  “Some other time, Mills?” She smiled to soften the blow. “Long day and tomorrow’s going to be even longer. Need to get some rack time.”

  His handsome face split into a wide grin. “I’ll hold you to that! Night, boss. Sleep well.”

  She watched him for a moment as he walked down the corridor, whistling to himself happily. Shaking her head, she called the lift. She would never understand people like that, the ones who never seemed to let life get to them. One thing was for sure, she wanted some of whatever he was having.

  The lift arrived, thankfully empty, and she stepped inside. Using her override as station security chief, she triggered the privacy setting so she could ride to her level in peace. Sure, it was an abuse of her power, but right now, she really didn’t care. Leaning down, she finally gave in to the demands of her body and rubbed her leg just above the damaged knee joint.

  She was only ten floors up, so the lift was there before she knew it. Stepping out, she trudged down the hall toward her quarters, keying in her code at the door. A cold chill washed over the back of her neck. She looked up sharply, sure someone was following her, but the corridor was empty.

  Huh. She must be more tired than she’d thought. Shaking her head, she stepped inside and let the door slide shut behind her. Her personal quarters consisted of three tiny rooms: a bedroom, a bathroom, and a combined living and kitchen area. There wasn’t enough room to swing a cat, not that she could afford something expensive like a pet. Fortunately, she didn’t need much room, never had.

  The pain in her leg ramped up to critical. She groaned as she flopped into the chair in front of the desk. Instead of the painkillers tucked into the top drawer, she reached for the bottle by the side of the console screen, pouring herself a generous measure.

  The console beeped, indicating an incoming call. She groaned as she recognized the caller ID. Catherine Archer-Russell. Her mother. Great, just what she needed after the day she’d had. Punching the answer button, she plastered a wide smile on her face.

  “Hi, Mom.”

  Her mother appeared on the screen, a neatly dressed woman in her mid-fifties although she would never admit to her actual age. Instantly her gaze cut to the glass in Eris’s hand, and her scarlet lips pursed in disapproval.

  “Eris… don’t you think it’s a little early for all that?”

  Eris gritted her teeth and managed to keep the smile on her face. She’d been a disappointment to her social-climbing mother since the day she’d been medically discharged. Especially under the conditions she’d been discharged. The accident that had taken her out of active service had brought the company who’d manufactured the Scorperio units under investigation… The company her mother’s husband part-owned.

  Taking another swallow, she hissed under her breath as the whiskey burned all the way down to her stomach. It wouldn’t deal with the pain, but at least it might allow her to fall asleep tonight.

  “Why? The sun’s over the yardarm. Somewhere. What do you want, Mom?”

  Her mother settled back down, her outfit perfectly coordinated with the cream leather of her couch. “Can’t I call my favorite daughter occasionally?”

  “I’m your only daughter.”

  Catherine waved dismissively. “Have you heard from Eric?”

  And there it was. She should have known her mom had only called for something to do with Eric. The golden child. Eris’s twin brother and the shining star of the Archer family, he was a doctor of something or other—something so complicated Eris’s eyes glazed over if she was ever forced to use his official title and area of specialty. Her mother liked to say he was the whole package—brains and looks to boot.

  The problem was, he was an utter dick. And that wasn’t even said with sibling affection. Eris wouldn’t be in the same room as her twin if you paid her.

  “Not recently, no,” she deadpanned, taking another sip from her glass. And by recently, she meant in the last four years or so. “Probably got lost in research again. You know how he is.”

  “Oh yes,” her mother trilled. “Of course. He’s so busy, so many projects… he must be under so much pressure.”

  Eris tuned out, making inroads into her whiskey as she let her mother wax lyrical on her favorite subject until the glass was empty. Then she smiled.

  “Great talk, Mom, but I have to go. Got an incoming alert. A security chief’s job is never done, you know!” she said, imitating Catherine’s trill and making sure to add her official position in there. It always shut her mother up.

  “Oh yes, of course, love. You know… I could talk to your father—”

  “Stepfather.”

  “—talk to your father about getting you a position with the corporation closer to home.”

  Eris kept her gritted teeth behind her pleasant smile. Over her dead body. There was no way she’d go work for Max Russell even if her life depended on it. The guy was slime with a capital S. She always felt like she needed a month-long bath in bleach every time she spoke to the guy. She had no idea what her mother saw in him.

  “I really think…”

  “No need, Mom. I…” Sensing that her mother was working up to one of her tirades, Eris went for the one thing she knew would get her mother off her back for a while. “Well, there’s a guy here and…”

  “Oh!” Surprise and then delight filtered across her mother’s surgery-enhanced features. “Why didn’t you say so! I have been so looking forward to grandchildren! Who is h—”

  “Gotta go, Mom. Needed on duty.”

  Eris cut the call and slumped back in her seat, running her hand through her hair. Then she groaned and looked at the whiskey bottle. First the doc and then her mom… bad luck always traveled in threes. What else did she have to look forward to?

  2

  Coming down here when she’d been drinking was never a good idea.

  Eris walked down the corridor in the bowels of the station, heading for the storage units. This wasn’t a civilian area, so she didn’t have to worry about watching her back or some asshole trying to pick her pocket. Most of the light-fingered crowd on the station knew that trying to lift anything from her would result in broken fingers and a stay in the cells. Still, every so often a newbie would try something. Right now, she wasn’t in the mood. Anyone who crossed her would likely end up with more than broken fingers. Much more.

  She only passed one person on her way down to the units. Tucked behind the lowest of the docking bays, the corridor had a lovely view of the sweet fuck all that was space. For a moment, she paused by the window, looking out. The abyss called to her, the siren’s call of nothingness to ease her wounded soul a temptation she knew to ignore.

  Pushing off from the wall, she walked along the row of storage units. Each was marked with an alphanumeric painted on the door with a retinal scanner in the wall beside it.

  She walked three-quarters of the way down the line and stopped in front of unit 74B-9. After staring the door down for a few moments, she triggered the scanner and picked the option for a retinal scan rather than an access code.

  “Welcome, Chief Archer,” the computer welcomed her as the door clamps released to swing open.

  The lights snapped on as she stepped over the threshold, working their way down to the back. One of the larger units, it was big enough to contain a small land vehicle, but the hulking figure standing by the back wall wasn’t anything so mundane.

  Instead, it was one of the most dangerous weapons in earth history—an armored tank suit.

  Her tank suit.

  “Hey, old girl,” Eris murmured in a low voice, walking toward it.

  She ran a gentle hand down the arm, over the battered paint and metal. Her fingers traced the lettering on the breastplate.

  Archer, E. Sgt. “Freya.” AIU: 31

  She’d found it in a surplus store a few months ago, in pieces and being sold for parts. After months of scouring the net for any mention of armored suits, she’d hardly dared to believe it. She’d expected it to be so
mething else… part of an actual tank or a loading exoskeleton with plates welded to it being passed off as a Scorperio. As soon as she’d seen the shrouded shape, though, she’d known.

  It was a shadow of its former self. When she’d found it, it had been little more than the torso cage and left leg. The arms and shoulder laser arrays were gone, but the left machine gun was still in place. It had been decommissioned, badly, but nothing an experienced suit operator/mechanic couldn’t fix easily. Remarkably, the shielding was all still there, even for parts that were missing, and as far as she could work out from her brief suit-up, none of the power cells were corrupt.

  She’d rebuilt it in here, sourcing the missing parts online. She hadn’t been able to see something so glorious left to rack and ruin, even if she couldn’t use it now. Not only could her body not take the neural load, but there were no mobile-tank units anymore. She had no idea what she was going to do with it when it was complete… donate it to a museum eventually, she guessed. But, for now, at times like these, she needed the comfort of an old friend.

  Turning around, she slid to the floor with her back to one of the legs. Reaching in her pocket, she liberated her hip flask and unscrewed the top. She lifted it and toasted the hulking monolith behind her.

  “Here’s to us, old girl. We did our best but got left behind. Didn’t we? At least we still got each other for the moment.”

  ❖

  “Please tell me you’ve done this before,” Zero said, eyeing the medical equipment as Talent set it up around him.

  It looked a lot more complicated than anything he’d used on himself in the past. It was all wires and tubes as Talent connected the auto-diagnostic bed to the console on the other side of the room.

  “Don’t you need to have qualified as a healer to use all this?” he asked nervously, trying to slide off the bed without Talent spotting him. A sharp look from the tall Lathar pinned him in place.

  “Not for these systems, no.” Talent’s hands moved confidently as he made sense of all the wires and plugged them in. “This is an auto-system so it doesn’t need a neural link. Still, it’s far in advance of the old scanners you guys were using. I can’t believe you still had it boxed up in storage.”

  Zero shrugged. “None of us could make heads nor tails of it. You’d think they’d come with instructions or something.”

  “Well, that’s what happens when you steal stuff.” A smile curved Talent’s lips as he knelt to put the last few connectors in place. “Yes, I’m well aware this unit was destined for the healer’s hall on Yxaniixos Seven.”

  Zero blinked. “How do you know that?” Even he hadn’t known that, and he’d been the one to boost the container from its shipment.

  “Auto-units aren’t that common. When one goes missing, the healer’s hall on Lathar Prime is informed. I was tasked with shipping a replacement unit out to them.”

  “Ahh.”

  That made sense. Medical units were expensive, but then again, so were imperial healers… and there was always the risk of falling out of favor with the empire and being barred, which was the reason they’d decided to “acquire” a unit. None of them had realized that simply setting one up required several decades of medical knowledge, a note from the lord healer, and a minor miracle.

  “Okay… we should be good to go.” Talent stood, slapping the side of the unit in satisfaction as he moved to stand behind the console. “Just lie as still as you can, no fidgeting. It’ll help me get a good initial scan.”

  Zero grunted in reply and went still. With absolute control over his body, no one could go as still as a cyborg. Well, as still as him because as far as he knew… he was the only one of his kind in existence.

  The machine whirred to life around him, intersecting holographic rings moving over and around each other as they scanned him. He didn’t bother closing his eyes. He just focused inward and let his onboard inform him about what was going on.

  He could tell he was being scanned, right down to the molecular level and… it itched. Ignoring the irritation, he pondered the feeling. His own systems were a constant source of fascination for him. Even though he had no memories before the point T’Raal had pulled him half-dead from the wreckage of his ship, he knew several things about himself.

  He had been made. Not born.

  There was no other explanation for it. Analysis of his skeletal structure and the enhancements made to it indicated that his implants were approximately six months younger than his biological components. Which meant either he’d come out of the womb an adult, or… yeah, he hadn’t been born.

  He’d been grown somehow.

  The tickle from the scanning ramped up a notch as the machine began a low-level whine of complaint. Too low for an unenhanced being to detect, the machine seemed to work harder to scan him. Probably because he was mostly machine.

  Given that, was he even a person?

  Yes. He was. He had to believe that. He was capable of independent thought, even when he shut his onboard down as far as he dared, to the bare minimum required to run his cybernetics. He was alive… and sentient… but past that, he didn’t know anything about himself. Even the few serial codes he could dig up from his base coding weren’t a match for anything from any known world or civilization. Not even humanity, the latest species to join the intergalactic community.

  Still, he couldn’t help a little curiosity over what Talent, formerly a member of the healer’s hall on Lathar Prime, would discover. The tickle in his body ramped up again. He gritted his teeth when it became an unpleasant buzz. Hopefully, this would be over soon.

  “Interesting.” Tal’s voice was low. “Physically, your biological construction mirrors the Lathar. Same bodily systems from what I can see. Your skeletal structure has been enhanced with an alloy I don’t recognize, and most of your joints are cybernetic. Internal organs are protected with mesh, again that I don’t recognize but your brain and ner… what the draanth?”

  The whine of complaint from the unit became a scream, and the intersecting rings circling him went into a frenzy.

  “Trall!” Talent hissed, hands moving frantically over the console. “It’s overloading. I can’t shut it down!”

  Zero heard the explosion before it started, that moment of stillness before a spark caught and fire flared.

  “Out! Now!”

  Talent moved faster than anyone Zero had ever seen before, shoving the big cyborg out the door ahead of him and slamming his hand over the door release. He heard a roar like all the hounds of hell had been released behind them in their fiery rage and then silence as the door slid shut behind them.

  BOOOOOM!

  Both men winced as the explosion hit, almost buckling the door of the medbay. Talent opened his mouth to speak, but Zero shook his head, pointing upward.

  Sure enough, within a half-second, T’Raal’s voice exploded over the comm. “What the fuck have you lot done to my ship?”

  Less than ten seconds later, the heavily muscled Lathar barreled down the corridor toward them followed by the rest of the crew. T’Raal skidded to a halt, his hands on his hips as he looked at the pair of them.

  His eyes narrowed as he spotted the door and then he rounded on Talent.

  “Okay, him I understand… give him half a chance, and something gets blown up. But you? And medbay?”

  “‘Snot his fault, boss,” Zero argued and stood upright. He shook his head to try and clear the ringing. “He was scanning me and… well, boom!”

  “Boom?” T’Raal didn’t look convinced, glancing over at Talent.

  “Boom.” Talent nodded in agreement. “Never seen a unit react that way before. I was just starting to scan your power core and…”

  “Boom?” Fin, leaning one shoulder against the wall, asked.

  “Yes! Exactly! Boom!” the medic agreed, his face alight with fascination. “We need to find another unit and scan again—”

  T’Raal squeaked, cutting him off. “Not on the Sprite, you’re not! Fuck’s sake, is the
re even anything left of medbay?”

  Zero winced and moved toward the door. Tentatively, he put his hand on the metal. It was buckled but not hot. Reaching out, he uplinked with the Sprite’s systems.

  “Sensors are toast in there,” he reported. “But hull integrity is uncompromised. It looks like the room contained the blast.”

  “Lucky for you,” T’Raal grunted, but Zero had caught his quick looks of concern when he’d arrived, making sure neither of them was injured. “You two are on cleanup duty. We’ll need to divert for resupply.”

  Zero’s heart leaped. Resupply meant they were headed where Lathar feared to tread, to the outer limits of Terran space. Unlike the Latharian empire and other powers, independents like the Warborne had known about the human species for a while. They only ever ventured along the edges of human territory, making sure to only visit the most outlying stations and colonies.

  But one of those was Tarantus Station. And that meant the beautiful station security chief, Eris Archer.

  ❖

  Eris was so not a morning person.

  She grunted as she sat down on the bed slowly and ran a hand through her loose hair. Reaching for her brace, she avoided looking at her leg. Scars made a patchwork of her skin, telling the tale of her shattered limb and highlighting the sites of her implants. The scars were smooth, old and silvery. No one would guess the damn things were burning out.

  With a sigh, she buckled the exoskeleton in place, making sure the contact points on the brace were sited correctly over the implant points that powered it. In an instant, the heaviness of the limb disappeared, and she stood easily. Quickly she pulled her uniform pants on, covering the brace. Unless the fabric was pulled tightly, no one would even know it was there.