Warrior's Wife (2 page)

Gideon was surprised by the male’s voice. His metallic skin suggested droid, but he sounded human.

“Perhaps you’re right.” Nigel sank into a seat. “Continue to monitor the past. We’re at a critical crossroads.”

The tech dipped his chin and backed out of the room. “Of course, please call if you need me, sir.”

“New assistant?” Gideon tilted his head toward the departing tech.

“Yes, Sebastian, a brilliant mech eliminated from the triad program for a minor bioengineering flaw—his skin.” Nigel’s mouth pursed as if he’d bit into a sour fruit. “Damn waste of a good mech for a ridiculous prejudice. The founders want mechs to look human, yet they treat them as machines.”

Gideon didn’t have anything helpful to contribute on the subject of mechs’ second-class status, so he kept it zipped.

Nigel stood and activated a small holo display with a wave of his hand.

A scene of Tori, wide-eyed with terror, struggling with a much more powerful cyborg shimmered to miniature life then vanished. Gideon’s jaw tightened with frustration, he needed to know she was safe.

“She’s been taken.” Sebastian reappeared and started toward the director. Nigel waved away his helper and steadied himself by clutching the console. “My fault.”

“Maybe she escaped?” Gideon wrenched off his helmet and ran a hand over his smooth-shaven head as if spearing through nonexistent hair would alleviate the fear chilling his systems.

Nigel moved on to another display out of Gideon’s line of sight. “Signs of a struggle and cyborg prints littered the site, plus restorer-marked blood and hydraulic fluid. Although she must have put up a good fight, the enemy has her.” Nigel’s shoulders rounded in defeat.

“Any human blood?” Gideon forced the hard question from lungs that fought to draw breath.

Nigel shook his head slowly. “No, but then there wouldn’t be. They need her alive.”

Alive wasn’t anywhere near good enough for his Tori. Dark images of what she might be suffering pushed Gideon into the apeshit crazy zone. He smashed a fist into the wall, making a hole that didn’t relieve a damn bit of his helpless frustration. “Fucking restorer scum.”

“Ah yes, quite right, although in this instance, I’m afraid the pet droid merits more of the blame. Entirely my fault, I missed the strategic importance of the fake dog.” The director of Triad missions tapped his chin with his index finger. The familiar gesture signaled deep thought. After a long pause, he stopped and squared his shoulders. “There’s one thing I haven’t tried. Triad unit 642837 remains on standby. Do you understand, Commander?”

“Yes sir.” Gideon gathered himself and managed a salute as Nigel disappeared.

“How long are we supposed to hang around with our thumbs up our asses?” Marcus grumbled.

Horace frowned. “Don’t act dumber than you are. You won’t remember waiting.”

“Maybe not, but I sure as hell remember failing our mission objective.” Gideon growled at the mechs, his closest friends. His team.

“No way, something went wrong with the timeline. We never solidified. That’s not a failure.” Marcus’ lips parted, showing lots of even teeth in an evil grin.

“We deployed without acquiring our target. Thus we experienced a failure,” Horace rebutted with his typical tactless certainty. The same quick mind, stubborn conviction and attention to detail that made him a great bioengineer sometimes grated on strained nerves in day-to-day operations.

“Who cares? The enemy has Tori.” Gideon snapped on his headpiece. “Put your helmets back on, we’re on standby.” He didn’t have the patience to tolerate a mind link with the mechs he loved like brothers. Letting his pals go without him wasn’t an option, so there was no point in mentioning the botched insertion meant the next trip to the past would be his third. Two trips were the current maximum, more than that resulted in permanent cellular damage. He’d made the choice to prep the seduction site, knowing the potential risk.

Both Marcus and Horace zipped it and complied.

In the resulting silence, Gideon’s thoughts zoomed straight to obsessing about Tori. Fear led him to the kind of horrors she’d suffer while he hung around like a useless jerk centuries away from helping her.

He’d started falling for her about five minutes into the first briefing and sapped out completely when Nigel began explaining she was destined to be their wife. Want to travel through time to post-pandemic Earth, find, seduce, marry and impregnate one the original founders? Absolutely. No need to ask any of them twice. He’d been all over that assignment.

Sure there were going to be challenges. She was a natural human, had never seen a mech or time travel or had any reference for polyamorous relationships.

Convincing her they were the right men for her was part of their mission. All three of them had studied Tori, romance and the art of seduction in depth with unparalleled enthusiasm. Gideon volunteered for an extra-hazardous insertion into the past to set up a farm house for romance. They’d been selected for the mission because they had the highest probability of success. That hadn’t changed.

Time travel came with built-in hazards. That’s what mechs had been bred and engineered to do—tackle the missions too dangerous for natural humans. He tucked away the memory of his last solo trip. Now wasn’t the time to share potential weakness with his team. They needed all the confidence he could give them.

No one had expected the restorers to counterstrike so fast. Clearly they had. Now the only solid historical point they had for Tori was useless. Finding her again in an already altered past was going to be like searching for a microchip in a tech dump during a hurricane.

All he knew for certain was the restorer cyborgs had Tori. She was one of a handful of female survivors and an original founder—a key player for both sides in the ongoing battle for control of the world’s government. Mechs’ first directive—founder safety—compelled them to undertake this mission. Their sacred duty to serve and protect drove them to succeed.

Failure wasn’t an acceptable outcome for mech warriors.

For Gideon the stakes were higher and more personal. The woman was his. He was ready to move mountains, reroute valleys and challenge the laws of time to save Tori.

Knowing the soulless cyborgs held her captive was killing him. Worse, the enemy’s agenda was far from the triad’s honorable objective.

Tori was one of a handful of vulnerable women survivors whose blood held a natural immunity to the contagion. The restorers needed that vital fluid to create a vaccine. Once they succeeded, they would send cyborgs into the pre-pandemic time period and inoculate key players who shared their survival-of-the-fittest philosophy. None of the politicians backing the scheme objected to killing a survivor in order to change history.

The scariest part was the restorers’ soldiers—ruthless cyborgs—had her. Sure the bastards needed her alive until the vaccine was viable, but her fragile body could suffer a lot of damage and still provide what their masters needed. The soulless scum didn’t have the programming to care. They might as well have been robots since their programming made them incapable of questioning orders.

A fine muscle in his cheek twitched to life while he worked on turning his molars into powder. A few more minutes of private head time and he’d be ready to ask Marcus and Horace to start sniping again.

The founders had learned from the first time-travel mission. Nigel’s ability to read the past gave them a huge edge. Jaunts into history redefined hazardous. Turned out the past was no more written in stone than the future. Anything and everything they did during a mission might impact the future in unforeseen ways. The real kicker was the lack of clues as to which actions might trigger a major shift in history.

A time-travel mission rode on fragile angel’s wings and founders’ prayers.

The founders’ reign had developed a utopian future. Everything they’d built—the technology that created mechs, made time travel a reality and brought worldwide prosperity—already crumbled around them.

While the mechs waited for Nigel to return with a miracle they watched a news holo-cast. Images of crowded camps of have-nots that had formed within hours outside the cities now shimmered and dissipated on the display platform. A reporter recited the latest world population numbers. They’d increased by a factor of ten. Another outbreak of typhoid had occurred in the slums around London.

An announcement from the Restorer Party leader interrupted the news. “Fellow citizens of Earth. This glorious day marks the return to the values all righteous men hold true. Success belongs to the strong.

“Do not be alarmed by the disease claiming the weak. This is a cruel, but necessary process. It’s the law of survival. This is unfortunate, but the natural way of culling the less worthy from our society. Those who qualify for membership in the Restorer Party will be fully protected by vaccination.

“Cyborgs are taking over the required manual labor more efficiently and with less drain on our resources than sub-humans. Their core programming prevents them from harming members of the Restorer Party. They have no emotions, no souls and no personal ambitions to make them unstable. The mechanically enhanced humans are the perfect servants—”

Marcus switched off the program with a snarl. “Strength isn’t the only measure of a person’s worth.”

“Damn straight,” Horace agreed then added, “Listening to that blowhard makes me almost sorry for the cyborgs.”

“I don’t feel for them. Not as long as the unnatural bastards have Tori.” Gideon growled. Saving her was civilization’s only hope. Sure as hellfire burned, she was worth risking his metal.

He ground his back teeth and prayed the triad got another chance.

Nigel saved Gideon’s molars by reappearing and dispensing three capsules to the waiting mechs. “These are receivers and locating programs calibrated for the pet droid. Once the bots are integrated into your neural net, you’ll have a lock on the fake dog within a five-hundred-mile range.”

The locked tension in Gideon’s neck and jaw eased enough for him to ask, “Anything else we need to know?”

“Ah, yes, of course. The droid must be turned on—the signal broadcasts from the pet’s motherboard, which is incorporated in its skeletal frame. Quite elegant…”

Gideon and Marcus grew matching scowls.

“Right you are. The design details aren’t relevant. There are a couple of points. Whatever happens, it’s unlikely the triad will return. Either she accepts the three of you or this complex ceases to exist. If you find her, inject the nanobots as soon as possible.” Nigel handed Horace a few vials and crossed to the control unit.

Horace cleared his throat, likely to assure Nigel he was eager to learn more about the bionic pet’s engineering specs or to discuss the science behind the bots Nigel had given him.

Gideon only wanted to find her. He opened the triad’s mind link at the same time he and Marcus angled their glowers at their favorite bioengineer.
Ready to go?

Number three hastily reconsidered encouraging their chatty director. He responded to Gideon’s question with a firm,
Hell
,
yes.

Yeah, but are you ready?
Marcus asked drily.

Horace all but quivered with willingness.
Ready.

Past ready on all counts.
Marcus confirmed.

Me too, pals. Let’s go rescue Tori.
Gideon closed the link with the traditional,
Protect and serve
.

The triad flipped down their shields then locked and sealed all connectors.

“Good luck!” Nigel activated the dimension-spanning beams.

Gideon’s senses blurred and blanked—the sign the triad had been disintegrated into a loose-particle stream. The formation allowed them to pass through the time dimension barrier then slip into the stream that ran between the centuries. Each trip through time ate a little more of their cellular integrity, no one could predict what kind of damage multiple exposures would cause. Guess he was going to find out. This trip blew him past the safe margin.
Please, God, keep me together long enough to rescue Tori.

* * * * *

Tori’s mouth tasted like a flock of pigeons had used it for a latrine. She probably smelled just as bad. She kept her eyes closed and took inventory—groggy, bad taste and a killer headache worsened by any strenuous activity, such as breathing. Her findings were consistent with the memory of a pinch on her neck. She made a prompt diagnosis of general anesthetic administered by injection. Prognosis—another hour or two of feeling like shit.

The tanker guys must’ve taken her weapon belt. Her jacket and vest had been removed too. At least they left her dressed. So far. A menacing soundtrack in the background would’ve completed the sense of impending disaster.

Her awareness sharpened as she lay very still. She kept her breathing slow and even, praying they hadn’t found her backup knife and for the strength to use it.

“She’s awake.”

She cracked an eyelid, squinting in the dim lantern glow. Two enormous males loomed over her.

Had she permanently incapacitated Rocky? She hoped so. That left Tank and Sly. Two against one still made rotten odds.

Aliens, androids or whatevers were both tall and powerfully built. They were encased in lightweight armor or else their skin was a metallic gray. Flexible mesh material covered their necks and faces, giving them a creepy insect-like appearance. This close they seemed completely inhuman. Not human might be good. Her encounters with survivor gangs of feral men had been close calls of the hostile-nightmares kind. The gang members had been ruthless, vicious fighters eager to add rape to their skill set. At least the tanker boys wanted her alive.