Cypher (The Dragon's Bidding Book 2) (7 page)

“Back on Rainbow,” Ski
said, “when you told me he was working for the Empire, I thought maybe he
hooked up with me only to get information. I’ll admit to being pissed.”

“You’ll get your chance
to talk to him tomorrow. I’m assigning him to work with you.”

“Right now I’m not sure
if I want to deck him or kiss him.”

Fitz gave a
half-hearted chuckle. “Wolf and I hoped to get away for a few days, just the
two of us. He knew of a little cabin up in the Cloud River Wilderness—no
computers, no comms, not even a tri-D unit.”

“
Yeah, and you made
it plain that I wasn’t invited,”
Jumper complained
.
“
Maybe Faydra
and I’ll go on our own holiday—no humans allowed
.”

“I think the chance of
any of us taking a vacation has been flushed out the airlock.” Fitz rolled her
shoulders and, as she raised her hand to rub the back of her neck, noticed the
fine tremors.

So did Ski, her eyes
narrowing. “I thought I told you to lay off the stims.”

“It’s not like I have a
choice. I’ve been a little pushed for time.”

“Stims aren’t going to
help any more. The symbiont has to clear them out of your system, so in the
long run it’s a net loss to your energy levels. You’re better off loading up on
the elixir.” She studied Fitz’s face. “Or eating regularly. With the organism’s
higher metabolic demands on your body, you don’t have the option of skipping
meals now.”

“Things have been so
hectic for the last few days that I haven’t had the luxury of regular dining
hours, so I’ve been living on hits of the elixir and emptied out my onboard
reservoir. The stims are just to get me through until I can find a few minutes
to reload it.”

“For Yig’s sake. Just
because you appear indestructible don’t mean you are. Now, take off your jacket
and sit over there.”

Fitz stripped off her
black jacket, draped it over the back of the chair, and pulled up the high-necked
armorcloth undershirt. The three faint spots on her side below her ribs could
easily be mistaken for blemishes, but were the ports for her pharmacopeia’s
reservoirs, embedded just below the skin. Ski returned with an infuser loaded
with the same pale fluid that flowed into Wolf’s veins, and slipped the needle
through the skin and into the port with such practiced skill that Fitz hardly
felt it. The negative pressure in the reservoir sucked in the viscous fluid. As
soon as she received a green light on her pharmacopeia readout, Fitz dialed up
a hit of the nutrient solution and savored the warm flush spreading through her
body, much like the sleepy contentedness after a particularly large holiday
dinner. She sighed as the symbiont’s chorus inside her head smoothed out into a
comfortable babble.

Ski snorted as she
picked up the empty infuser. “You’d think I was some kind of drug pusher. At
least this stuff is good for you, but it’s no substitute for a decent meal.
When he gets up, Wolf is going to be hungry enough to eat a neubeast whole, so
go someplace nice for dinner. Doctor’s orders. And it wouldn’t hurt for him to
be seen in public after he’s been out of circulation these past few days.
People talk.”

Fitz slipped back into
her jacket. “What have you found out about that needler I sent?”

Ski crossed the room
and brought up a file on her computer. “Nasty piece of work, that. Only one use
for it, and that’s killing Lazzinairs. Needlers aren’t usually lethal weapons.
Load-outs generally range from mild tranqs to paralytics.”

Bartonelli abandoned
her game with the cat to join them as they studied the display. “They’re ideal
for taking out sentries. It’s subsonic, almost no sound, and leaves an easily
overlooked entry wound. If you’re good, they think it’s only an insect bite,
and then it’s sleepy time. Although I have heard of some sleaze-bag bounty
hunters who load them with toxins if they don’t care whether their target is
dead or alive.”

The computer displayed
an exploded view of the pistol, revealing a canister packed with hundreds of
tiny darts. Further magnification revealed that the injector at the tip of each
had been replaced with a sliver of a flat black substance.

“Those are made from
the blades of Tzrakas?”

“That would be my
guess,” Ski answered. “We don’t believe the virus-like organism is in all parts
of their bodies, but we do know it’s in the blades. And you could make a lot of
these darts with a single one.”

“Not much material there.
Would that be enough to kill one of us?”

“Wouldn’t be pretty,
but it would do the job. I ran some tests on a sample of my blood and, for
comparison, some the sergeant supplied. In a person uninfected with the
symbiont, it enters the body and replicates at an astonishing rate, then goes
dormant in the cells and waits. If the symbiont is introduced it reactivates
and attacks, destroying it, but in the process the hemotoxin it produces kills
the host.

“If one of us were
nailed with that needler, would there be time to do something about it?” Fitz
asked.

“Possibly, if you cut
the dart out fast enough.”

“Yeah, but that’s the
problem with needlers,” Bartonelli said. “Sometimes you don’t even feel it, or
you think it’s an insect sting. Only way to protect yourself is to always wear
body armor.”

“Unless you live your
life in a full combat suit, there’s always some skin exposed. Like your hands.”
Fitz raised her arms, palms out stretched.

“And you’d have to wear
a helmet,” the doctor said. “I suspect even a Lazzinair isn’t immune to a
couple of slugs through the brain.”

A series of chimes from
the bed monitor interrupted them. “Ah, the sleeper awakens,” said Ski. “You get
the dubious pleasure of telling Wolf that while he was asleep, Tritico declared
open season on us.”

Fitz’s answering
chuckle was little more than a growl as she went to Wolf’s side, Jumper
following.

Despite his stillness,
she sensed he was awake. As she brushed his bare shoulder, he gasped and his
body tensed in all the right places. Her laughter suggested the pleasures she
planned for him as she hovered above him, letting her tongue taste the outline
of his mouth. The response was immediate; his tongue invaded her mouth with a
blistering need that made her ache to crawl onto the medical bed and straddle
him then and there, audience be damned.

As she lifted her
mouth, his teeth seized her lower lip, refusing to release her. Pleasure
quickly accelerated to pain. Fitz pulled back, tasting blood on her lip.

Jumper leaped onto the
gurney, head-butted Wolf’s face, then jerked back, hissing.
“That’s not him,
Boss Lady. That’s not Wolf.”

The man opened his
eyes, a glitter in his azure gaze, and one side of his mouth twisted in a
wicked smirk.

The mind behind those
roguish eyes did not bear the slightest resemblance to the man Fitz knew and
loved.

A void hovered behind
him, a blank wall, dark and impenetrable. The Nameless Man awoke with an
edginess that warned he’d been trapped in a nightmarish dreamscape, but he
remembered only fear and anger, and a terrible sense of loss. The present
consisted solely of sound and smell. And sight, but his training warned him to
keep his eyes closed and his consciousness hidden until he’d assessed the
situation.

Training? He couldn’t
remember any training, and yet the knowledge was there. Couldn’t remember how
he’d come to be here, or why. Or who. He didn’t even know if he was he…or she.
Or something else entirely. Could not recall…a name.

He pushed down the
panic and concentrated with the senses available to him. Sounds hammered
against his brain.

Too loud.

His mind reached out
instinctively to turn down the noise inside his head, and a jumble of icons and
alphanumerics blazed in the darkness, a computer display seemingly written on
the underside of his eyelids. The digital chaos receded as he thought-clicked
on the programs, banishing each to a toolbar marching down the right side of
his mind-sight.

How had he known to do
that?

If not who, he at least
had a name for what he was. An augie. A cybernetically augmented…what? Man? He
thought of himself as male, but still had no memory of any life he might have
lived before a few seconds ago.

A cloying scent clung
to his body, clogging his nostrils and coating the back of his throat,
confirming he’d just come out of an operating tank. But why had they wiped his
memory before making him a cyborg?

Around him, electronics
chirped and muttered in a large echoing room. The inhead display fed him
dimensions of the space and pinpointed three voices, all female, 3.7 meters
away. A warm laugh bubbled from one, igniting a surge that raced down his
nervous system straight to his groin.

Oh, most definitely
male
.

A set of footsteps
moved toward him. A small woman, judging by the short, quick stride. He dialed
up his hearing and listened to the whisper of her clothing sliding across her
skin, the cadence of her heartbeat accelerating as she came to his side. In the
back of his mind, a wordless whispering began, swelling in intensity as she
grew closer. A half-remembered scent of woodsy soap mingled with the dark,
musky womaness of her, making him ache to drag her to the floor and bury
himself deep inside her.

Fingertips brushed his
bare shoulder, driving a sharp, involuntary gasp from him. Beneath the thin
blanket covering his hips, his body responded to the touch. The woman chuckled,
deep-throated and appreciative. The feather of her breath across his face told
him that she leaned over him, but he didn’t realize how close until her tongue
traced the outline of his mouth. He parted his lips and pulled her in, their
tongues moving together in an achingly familiar dance. His soul knew this
woman, knew every dark and sweet recess of her mouth, every caress of her
tongue, every secret pleasure of her body.

When the need to
breathe forced her to break the kiss, he refused to let go, seizing her lower
lip in his teeth. He needed to see her, this wanton angel who felt so familiar
to him, and he left the safety of his darkness to open his eyes.

His soul might know
her, but his mind had no clue who she was.

Not a classic beauty,
her not-quite blonde hair curled around a face with features too strong, a jaw
too stubborn. This woman needed no one’s protection, nor would she allow anyone
to dominate her. She would stand shoulder to shoulder with him in a fight, and
Yig help the person who found himself facing her in battle. Eyes the cool gray
of sea fog locked gazes with him, then darkened to the color of cold iron. Her
arm blurred up with a speed too quick to follow, her fingers clamping around
his neck and jamming the air in his windpipe. Ice frosted her words.

“Who the hell are you,
and where is Wolf?”

The Nameless Man
reached to pry her fingers from his throat, but his arm came up too fast, too
hard, and slammed into her shoulder, knocking her to the side. She went down,
her hold dragging him from the gurney. They crashed to the floor together, him
on top, and his weight drove a sharp expletive from her. Her grip loosened
enough for him to pull free. She swung for his jaw, but the blanket that had
been covering him fouled her blow and he jerked back in time. He jumped to his
feet, the world twisting around him oddly, skewing his perception. He stumbled,
his bare feet slid on the slick tile floor, and he clutched at the bed to stay
upright.

Gray Eyes threw off the
encumbering blanket, but before she could rise, he tipped the gurney over on
her. He lurched back, blundering into another woman in a white medical coat. A
cup of coffee flew out of her hand.

Escape.
He had to get out of here. If he didn’t, he was a dead man.

He leapt toward the
door and flew several meters in a shallow, uncontrolled arc, his legs churning
and arms flailing. He managed to get his feet underneath him as he landed, but
he moved too fast to keep his balance. The blank white of a tiled wall rushed
at him with unbelievable speed. Twisting at the last second, he collided with
bone-jarring force. Tiles cracked; pain lanced through his shoulder. His ears
ringing, he staggered back, blinking, but his perception felt all wrong. The
doctor he’d knocked down still hung suspended, falling backward, arms
outstretched. The tumbling coffee cup hadn’t reached the floor yet. Initially,
he thought time had stalled, but a brown blob of liquid appeared at the lip of
the spinning cup and swam out.

The Nameless Man
laughed as he recognized it. It had to be the weird hyperawareness cyborgs
slipped into to comprehend the world around them when moving at hyperkinetic
speed. He raised his hands and stared at them.

The things he could do
now. No one could stop him.

The gurney clattered
and bounced across the floor, propelled by an awesome force. The gray eyed
woman flipped to her feet with frightening grace. For the first time he noticed
her black uniform. SpecOps. A Black Jacket. That meant another augie. She
charged, ripping through the slow motion blizzard of data cubes, tablets and
broken glass still raining down around her, moving like a projectile through a
snow storm.

Get out. Get out, now.

He sprang for the door,
desperate to evade her, but she tracked him with the focus of a missile’s
guidance system. The force of her body slamming into him drove him face first
into the wall. Blood filled his mouth as his teeth snapped shut on his tongue.
With her fist tangled in his hair, she clawed at the back of his skull.

He couldn’t let her
pull his spike and shut down his cybernetic functions. If she did, he would
die, cease to exist. Of that he had no doubt. With all his augmented strength,
he pushed back, forcing them away from the wall. He reached behind him, seized
her collar, and flipped her over his shoulder. Her grip tore free, at the cost
of a handful of his hair, but in his panic the pain was easy to ignore. Her
fingers wrapped around his ankle and brought him down as he tried to leap away.
She straddled his chest and pinned his head, her hands a vice on either side of
his face. She leaned in, screamed at him.

“Stop it, Wolf. Just
stop
it
.” Her voice had the knife-hard sting of command, but tears streamed down
her face.

He swung, a wild,
uncontrolled flail, driving her off to the side. Before she could rise, he
gained his feet, grabbed her jacket and belt, and hoisted her over his head. He
tossed her high and hard into the plexisteel wall of the tank with a crack that
set its robotic arms rattling and swaying. At first he feared the tank would
rupture, flooding the room, but the plexisteel held. Her body slid down the
glass.

Only a small dusky-skinned
woman stood between him and the door now, bringing a pistol to bear on him.
Hesitation hovered in her dark eyes as he charged her. He smashed the weapon
aside. The hot flash of the belated shot blazed past his face. He slugged her,
then hit her again, sensing something break inside her. Fear drove him, and he
smashed his fist into her again and again. The clatter of flying debris told
him the augie had fought her way to her feet and would be on him in seconds.

A long, clumsy leap carried
him to the door, but it wouldn’t open. He pounded on it, drove his shoulder
into it, but only dented the metal.

My access code.

He clawed at the keypad,
fingernails skittering on the panel. The rapid squeak of boot soles against the
tile floor warned him that the augie sprinted toward him.

The code, the code.

But he didn’t have a
code, did he? Suddenly it appeared in his mind and he shouted, not trusting his
shaking fingers to enter the string of numbers before she hit him again.

“9686425663WA”

Where had that
information come from?

The door slid open and
he charged through, pausing on the other side long enough to shout, “Close and
lock!” The mechanism obeyed, sliding shut as a fast-moving object hit the other
side with enough force to shake the entire wall.

The Nameless Man ran
blind, without direction, no thought beyond escape. He blurred down corridors,
bouncing off the walls when he couldn’t break his speed quickly enough around
the corners. The building felt empty, with only maintenance bots in the halls
to trip him if he couldn’t leap over them in time.

The fear made him
angry, and anger made him sloppy. He tried to break his headlong flight, hitting
the wall and careening around another corner.

Dead end
.

He whirled back, but
heard no sound of pursuit. Had his trick with the locked door slowed her, or
was she silently trailing him? His thermal vision showed the lingering heat of
his bare feet leading back up the corridor.

Might as well draw her
a map.

He stared around,
realizing he hadn’t run into a dead end, but a lift alcove. The panels of the
three doors, each displaying a different floor, appeared frozen in time
distortion, but even as he watched, they started to move, tick over, pick up
speed. His perception twisted as the world slowed until he once again merged
with the normal flow of time.

One car coasted to a
stop and the door opened on a technician, leaning against the wall studying his
tablet. Before the man looked up, The Nameless Man slugged him and lowered the
limp body to the floor. Ripping out the surveillance camera came next.

He scanned the car’s
display. “Maintenance. Sub-level five. Emergency activation.”

“Authorization?” The
computer-generated voice challenged him.

He raked the tangle of
hair out of his face and held his breath. It had worked before, but would it
now? He had no memory of where that authorization code came from, or why he
knew it. A distant crash startled him.

What choice do I have?

The alphanumeric string
came to his lips easily, as if he’d used it all his life—a life he had no
knowledge of. The doors slid shut and the car plunged downward, picking up
speed.

How much longer would
the code continue to work? The gray-eyed woman could be purging it from the
system now, trapping him inside a building under lock-down. He laughed. No, she
wouldn’t. That code revealed his every move. Each time he used it, he sent her
an announcement. Here I am. Here’s where I’m going. Of course she wouldn’t
block it; she’d sit back and follow his path like a scientist studying a gerbat
in a maze.

No more running,
reacting. Time to take the initiative. Hell, they’d made him an augie; time to
act like one. He retreated into his mindscape, thought-clicking through a maze
of security, firewalls crumbling under the power of that access code. A bank of
security monitors swum in his vision.

The thought of locating
Gray Eyes, of watching her try to puzzle out where he’d gone, tempted him, but
he couldn’t risk taking the time; not when she’d soon realize the mistake of
leaving him with access into the building’s security. He paged through the
screens, deactivating a camera here, another there, in what he hoped would look
random. Far from it, he’d opened up his escape route, along with half a dozen
others, false trails to keep them running in circles.

Who was he, that he had
such a high level access code? A thin man stared back at him from the polished
metal of the door, pale and naked. A tangle of blond hair hung around his
shoulders. He pushed it back in frustration. As soon as he could get his hands
on a knife, this was coming off. Only an idiot would provide such a convenient
handhold for his opponents in a brawl.

He couldn’t put a name
to that face, only knew it wasn’t his. Not that he remembered what he looked
like anymore than he recalled his name, but he knew he wouldn’t look like this.
A blond pretty boy didn’t fit with his image of himself.

The tech moaned so he
kicked him, several times, to drive out the last of the jittery fear
threatening to swamp him. He changed into the man’s scrubs.