Page 2 of Kiss of Steel

He whirled around as the cargo bay door peeled open.

Chapter Two

Steel dropped into a fighting stance, his heart pumping oxygenated blood to his muscles.

“Oh good, you’re awake,” the cyborg said.

“What the fuck do you want?” Steel said.

“Easy, dude. We’re on the same side.” Cheeks dimpled, but the affable grin didn’t reach his eyes.

Steel used that same smile sans dimples to lure targets into a false sense of security. “What side is that?” He sized up his adversary, noting no obvious weapons on his person. The pocketless, beltless one-piece uniform had no place to hide them. But a cyborg was lethal enough without a weapon. A cyborg was a weapon.

“Fugitives.”

“I’ve heard that one before.” The cyborg who’d betrayed him had claimed to be on the lam, too.

“Not from me.”

“And who the fuck are you?”

“I’m model C5-105, code name Fury, but you can call me Mike. Seeing how I’m footloose and fancy free for the first time in my life, I’m celebrating the milestone with a name change.”

C5-105 meant he was a fifth iteration, the 105thout of the gestation tank. Steel, C5-104, had preceded him, making them brothers of sorts. However, cyborgs had neither kith nor kin, there being little trust or friendship among the units. They worked in tandem to the extent required to achieve their directives, but Solutions called the shots. At any time, if ordered, they would turn on each other, he’d learned through bitter experience.

And despite their gestational proximity, they shared no “family likeness.” Blue-eyed, fair-haired C5-105 looked more like a celebrity heartthrob than a heartless killer—a huge asset in their line of work. No one expected an assassin to be baby-faced and handsome.

Steel’s advantage was his ability to blend in and pass for any number of human races. With his brown skin, hair, and eyes, he could be of African descent, Indian, Middle Eastern, Hispanic, Indigenous North or South American. His generic face enabled him to kill and slip away unnoticed.

“And you are?” Fury prompted.

“None of your fucking business.”

“Well, it’s a little long, but if that’s the name you want to use… Okay if I call you Fucking?”

“Okay if I call you Dipshit?”

“We don’t know each other, but, like it or not, we’re in this together. We can cooperate to get our asses off this ship, or we can wait for Solutions to discover we weren’t incinerated and let them finish the job.”

Once a threat, always a threat. C5-105’s congenial kumbaya didn’t fool him. But he was right about the urgency of getting off the ship. “Do you have any idea what happened? It feels like the ship is drifting in space.”

He nodded. “It is. The electronics got knocked out. Coulda been solar flares, coronal mass ejection, or cosmic rays, but some sort of electromagnetic surge toasted the robo crew, too. We’re fortunate we were powered down when it hit, or we’d be like the robos—lights out, nobody coming home.” He had a way with words, using human colloquialisms to appear congenial, nonthreatening. A cyborg’s ability to adapt and assimilate was why Solutions, Inc. had deployed them instead of androids as assassins. No matter how good the synthetic skin and programming, you could always spot a bot. A mostly organic machine was harder to detect.

The surge is probably what disabled the collars and reactivated us.Anything electronic switched to ON would have been fried, and anything OFF could have been turned on.

The surge had unsealed C5-105’s pod. “You didn’t think to check on me? Or did you even look?”

He shrugged. “Well, Fucking, I did notice your pod. I assumed you were either dead or were perfectly capable of getting yourself out. I considered reconnaissance a more pressing need than babysitting. Are you always so grumpy after reactivation?”

Steel let the dig slide. Fury wasn’t wrong when he said there were more pressing concerns. “On your reconnaissance, did you happen to discover how long we’ve been adrift? How much time we have left?”

“Time left, as in how long before Solutions comes looking for us or before the auxiliary power quits and we run out of oxygen?”

Fuck. He hadn’t considered the latter. Due to their fast metabolism, cyborgs required more oxygen than the average human. At rest, they burned more oxygen than a human running at full speed.

“We’ve been in space five days,” Fury replied. “We’re a day from Hell’s Gate. The surge occurred about an hour ago. Auxiliary power core has already dropped to 90 percent. We need to shut off some shit—lights, heat, grav simulation. Reduce the power suck.”

“I’m surprised this much is running on aux power when the crew is robotic.” Robos didn’t need light or an ambient temperature; their processors ran better in cooler temps anyway. Notoriously heavy, they could function in lower gravity. Earth’s gravity was 9.8 newtons per kilogram. Spaceship artificial gravity was 8 N/kg. Robos, depending on their specific weight, could function at three or even two.

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