Chapter One
They’d caught him. Lock, stock and f**king barrel.
Lyon seethed in silence as the security officers buzzed around his maximum-security cell like flies around a honeypot. He was furious, more with himself than anyone else. He should have known General Ryland, über-marine legend, wasn’t going to be that easy to catch.
For heaven’s sake, he’d read the goddamn file on the woman. The one clearly marked “Do not f**k with”. He might as well have just looked at the pictures. He’d been too arrogant and assured of his own abilities.
As soon as he’d seen her among the Arcadia marines, he’d recognized her. She was dangerous, inventive and unpredictable. He’d known that. What he hadn’t known, and was now kicking himself for, was that she’d have an Empath virtually joined at the hip.
“To the back of the cell,” the guard ordered. The hard look in his eyes warned Lyon not to try anything. His team had killed some of this man’s crewmates and, from the looks of it, the guy was itching for payback. Lyon would prefer to avoid being the mechanism for that payback. Cyborg he might be, but even he could feel pain.
Rolling to his feet, he stood, and smothered a smile as the female guard at the back gasped. Yeah, he was big. Over six foot and broad across the shoulders, just the same as any other Leo class out there. It wasn’t fate. It wasn’t hours spent in the gym honing his physique. He’d been designed to be big. He was the biological equivalent of a tank.
A right lot of good that had done him when he’d tracked Ryland. He’d been so focused on getting the general in his clutches and finally getting a shot at persuading someone high up in the Fleet that he and his kind weren’t the monsters they were made out to be that he’d all but ignored the guy with her.
Big mistake.
All it had taken was for Ryland to distract him by flitting almost close enough to catch. While his attention was on her, the Empath had sneaked up behind him. Lyon couldn’t figure out how he’d done it. Anyone else he’d have detected. Something would have tipped him off. The slight scuffle of a boot in the undergrowth or a caught breath would have caught his hypersensitive senses. Not this time.
He replayed that chronology of his capture over and over in his memory to try to figure it out. There was nothing. It was as though the guy hadn’t even been there until he’d placed his hand on the back of Lyon’s neck and tumbled him into darkness.
Note to self, avoid Empaths in future. That, or break their f**king necks before they get close.
He moved to the back of the cell. He’d been through the drill before, so he moved before they gave the order, standing facing the wall with his hands behind his back.
“Being a good little machine today, are we?” the guard behind him sneered as he clipped the heavy manacles over Lyon’s wrist. He activated the magnetic locks.
Instantly, Lyon felt the energy drain.
The Fleet had created him and his kind. They knew how to contain them. At least, they thought they did. What they didn’t know was how extensively Lyon’s base systems had been hacked and modified. Something he intended to stop them discovering at all costs, even if he had to set the tri-sappherium crystals that powered his cybernetics and combat chassis to overload. The resulting blast would take out not only him, but also the ship and possibly most of the system as well.
Gritting his teeth, he ignored the pain as they hauled him backward out of the cell.
“That won’t do you any good. Once they get you on the Valkyrie, they’ll slice and dice you. See what makes you tick.”
“The Valkyrie?”
He couldn’t help the query. It slipped from between his lips before he could stop himself. Even as he spoke, he ran a query through his onboard computer. What portion of his memory banks he could access at the moment. As soon as he’d realized there was an Empath near, he’d locked his memory banks down.
There it was, the CFS Valkyrie. A Delean-class vessel assigned to exploration and general backup for the colonies and planets in this sector. Lyon swore under his breath.
He’d assumed that they would transport him back to the Terran sector on the Arcadia.
That was the eventuality his team had been briefed for in case the snatch and grab went wrong and they had to recover any of the team.
Great, just bloody great. Unless he did something, his team would tail the Arcadia across the sector. Only to find their prize was on a ship heading the other way. The guard behind him checked the mag-cuffs and he was ushered out of the cell.
Despite the fact he was restrained, the guards kept a healthy distance from him. Lyon didn’t blame them. The hardware he was packing under his skin meant he could hospitalize someone just by falling on them.
He sighed as the little group started down the corridor toward the airlock and the ship he was being transferred to. They stayed far enough out of range that he couldn’t even try a grab and strangle maneuver. Someone would have a rifle in his guts before he could blink. But he didn’t need to disable anyone to get a message to his team that he was being transferred. All he needed was an open comms port and a half second to get a data burst through it. Then he was home free…
“Late, late. I’m going to be late. Damn it.”
Samara bustled down the hall. She was late for her shift. Again. The third time this week, on a day they were transferring a new prisoner in. Commander Jenkins, the senior nurse, was going to be pissed with her. Again.
She researched her speech in her head as she hurried. Her slender fingers fought with the frog fastening on her collar, trying to get the damn thing done up. It had always hated her, but today it was being more awkward than normal. Just like her alarm clock, which had decided to wake her up an hour later than normal. Why, she had no earthly clue. It seemed everything aboard this damn ship had it in for her.
She hissed with relief as the fastener snapped closed. Which only prompted the single bar of her rank, second-class crewman, to jump from her collar in a lemming leap for the floor.
“Oh no. You bastard thing!”
She made a dive for it, grabbing the thin bar of metal and starting to straighten just as she reached a corner. Preoccupied, she didn’t look where she was going and completely missed the armed retinue coming the other way. She ran straight into them.
Squeaking, she grabbed the first thing she could get her hands on. A male chest. A broad, extremely well-muscled male chest. She grabbed at his gray ship-suit and fought for balance.
She wasn’t going to fall. There were few things more embarrassing than landing on her ass in front of a group of people. She was not going there under any circumstances, even if that meant touching up a complete, and incidentally very nicely put-together, stranger.
“Oh my God. I’m so sorry.” Flames licked her cheeks as she looked up. Right into gorgeous green eyes. Oh my, green eyes. Why did it have to be green eyes?
Everything happened at once. The group around her snapped into life, and within a heartbeat, Samara had rifles pointed at her from all directions. Rifles attached to some very mean-looking marines. Instinctively she shrank closer to her green-eyed “rescuer”.
“Miss, I need you to step away. Just step away from him. Come on, miss…now. Please.”
The nearest marine lowered his rifle and held out his hand. The tone of his voice and the expression on his face were both near pleading. Like he was trying to talk a jumper down from the edge of a rooftop.
“They think I’m going to rape and kill you. Or kill and rape you,” a dry voice commented. “Of course, how they think I’m going to do that with my hands behind my back eludes me.”
Startled, Samara looked back up at Green-eyes. At the same time she started to notice more. Like the fact his hands were manacled behind his back and that his ship-suit was gray with the orange line of a prisoner down the sides of his arms and legs.
Her lips pursed into a small “O” of surprise as she studied him further. His dark hair was cropped close to his skull, casting the strong lines of his face into sharp relief.
He turned his head to glare at the marines and she caught her breath. There, on one cheekbone, was a small tattoo. It was a distinctive tattoo. One that every free person in the sector—hell, the galaxy and beyond—would recognize. A combination of six letters and digits… The alphanumeric code of a cyborg.
“Shit.”
Samara couldn’t help the epithet that crossed her lips as she backpedaled. She’d heard the horror stories. Everyone had. Cyborgs were merciless killers, apt to kidnap innocent women for their breeding experiments. Oh and they ate babies.
“Lyon, actually.”
His lips quirked wryly, but she caught the flash of something in his eyes as she backed up. Anger, or hurt? Embarrassment flared hot across her cheeks and she stopped, standing her ground. Her grandmother’s voice filled her head. Don’t judge a book by its cover, young lady. You never know what treasures lie beneath the cover.
“That was ill-bred of me. I apologize. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m late for work.”
* * * * *
She’d apologized. A human had actually apologized to him. Lyon’s surprise lasted all the way down to the medical bays and right into the detention cell that awaited him.
Of course, he was a soldier first, so that surprise didn’t stop him from scanning the local area for an open connection to the communications array.
Bingo. As the guards shoved him through the door to the cell, he found an unsecured port. It took him less than a second to hijack a medical report and piggyback his message. Once off the ship, the message would detach and ping out the ether until it found a route to the Chameleon, cloaked and waiting to strike from the shadows.
Three days after sending his message, Lyon was shoved back into his cell, bloody and bruised from the latest round of “tests”. He was beginning to wonder if his message had managed to make it off the ship. Stumbling from a vicious shove, he caught himself against the opposite wall and pushed upright. He glared back over his shoulder, a look of dire retribution and hatred. Just five minutes out of the mag-cuffs, that’s all he needed. Then he’d show these researchers and their pet guards what a cyborg was truly capable of.
The guard paled at the look and disappeared. Alone, as much as he’d ever be with cameras watching his every movement, he sank down onto the narrow bunk. It was barely wide enough for a child, but he managed to wedge his shoulders between its hard surface and the wall at night to get some sleep.
Closing his eyes, he let his head drop back. Without moving a muscle, he activated several circuits and subroutines in the bio-cybernetic systems that laced his body. His lips quirked as the guard down the hall swore. “Crap, the cameras are playing up again.”
“Does that mean I’ll have to wait? I do have other things to do, you know.”
Lyon stilled at the new voice. A female voice. The voice he’d been waiting for. It was her. The nurse who’d apologized to him in the corridor. Despite himself, he sat up a little straighter. His male pride wouldn’t allow him to show anything that might indicate defeat. Not that it made any difference. She was human and he was a cyborg.