Unchained_ A science fiction romance adventure Read online

  Unchained

  Ruby Lionsdrake

  Copyright © 2018 by Ruby Lionsdrake

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Greetings, good reader. This story is a little outside of my usual wheelhouse, and I appreciate you picking it up and giving it a try. I enjoyed the characters and the relationship they developed, and I hope you will too. Also, asteroid prisons full of bare-chested men? What’s not to love?

  As always, thank you to my editor, Shelley Holloway, my cover designers, Deranged Doctor Design, and thank you to my beta readers Sarah Engelke, Cindy Wilkinson, and Kit Greenhouse.

  Prologue

  Sweat ran down his bare arms and dripped from his short black hair. It splashed onto the stark, textured-metal floor of his cell, joining tiny stains from past sweat drops, a testament to the thousands of push-ups he’d done since he’d arrived. Hundreds of thousands. Millions?

  He didn’t count the exercises any more than he counted the days he’d been incarcerated. What was the point, especially now with the end coming? If his enhanced muscles didn’t cry out for a release, he wouldn’t have done the push-ups, or the sit-ups, or the one-legged squats, but they did, so he did.

  With his augmented ears, he heard the soft thud of footsteps in the corridor outside his cell. The familiar gait belonged to Stavis, one of the more obnoxious guards. He was positive of his identification long before Stavis arrived in front of the clear forcefield that made the cell escape-proof. Thousands of dents marred the metal walls on the other three sides, dents he’d left when frustrated enough to punch them, but nothing ever dented the forcefield.

  “Tommy Boy,” the guard drawled, stopping in front of the cell, as he often did for no particular reason, other than to gloat or torment him. “How’s solitary? You missing your network access?”

  He missed the music that he’d been able to access via the network. The silence grated on him, but he wouldn’t speak of it with the guards.

  “It’s Jerick,” he corrected, as he’d done hundreds of times before. Nobody had called him Tom since he joined the fleet more than a decade earlier, and nobody had ever called him Tommy. “Sergeant Jerick.”

  “You aren’t sergeant of anything now, pal. Except that cell. What’s with all the push-ups? You’ve only got two days left to live. You can’t take all those muscles or mutant implants with you to hell.”

  Rage welled up in Jerick, rage and indignation that the guard would treat him this way after he’d fought for six years to turn back the Hrorak, to keep Earth and humanity’s thirteen space colonies free from the alien invaders. But what right did he have to honor and respect anymore? The war had ended, and he’d screwed up. This was his fate.

  That didn’t mean it was easy to accept.

  “I do ’em so you can come admire my back,” Jerick said, straining to keep his voice indifferent. He didn’t want the guard to sense his vulnerability, that he lamented the past and was terrified of the future. Even if it was a very short future. At least after it was done, he wouldn’t have to deal with Stavis’s smug satisfaction any longer. He wouldn’t have to deal with anything. “You know nobody here is as sexy as I am,” he added.

  Stavis snorted. “That might have been true yesterday, but it won’t be true tomorrow. Look at what’s coming.”

  The guard unrolled a tablet and shook it out, as if it were old-fashioned paper with ink drying on it, then held it up to the forcefield.

  Jerick saw it out of the corner of his eye, but with his face pointed toward the sweat-slick floor, he couldn’t see what was displayed on the device. For a long moment, he stayed where he was with his arms locked, telling himself he didn’t care what news Stavis had. But he had always been curious about everything and everyone, his mind fueled by the ideas that came from the galaxy outside of him. Even locked up in a cell, he’d dreamed. Dreamed of what might have been if he hadn’t made such a fatal mistake.

  Stavis shook the tablet.

  “You’ll regret it if you don’t look.” His tone was teasing. Taunting.

  “I doubt it,” Jerick said, again feigning indifference.

  Still, he jumped to his feet, turning swiftly toward the forcefield. He didn’t brush it, as he knew all too well how much that hurt, but had the satisfaction of seeing Stavis flinch and step back before catching himself. Jerick was a big and intimidating man—that was why he’d been picked for the cyborg program all those years ago, why the military scientists had been willing to spend time and money experimenting on him, turning him into a super soldier to sic on the Hrorak.

  Jerick knew he shouldn’t delight in Stavis’s reaction, but he couldn’t help it. The damn guard had tortured him more than once, for no other reason than he got off on it.

  Stavis sneered and stepped closer, holding up the tablet again. It showed an image of a brown-haired woman with dark eyes and olive skin wearing a white lab coat while she clutched a stack of books to her chest. She didn’t look like she’d posed for a camera, rather that she’d been lost in thought when someone had called her name and gotten her to turn around.

  That name, according to the text underneath, was Dr. Skylar Russo. A couple of lines following the name proclaimed her to be a neuroscientist, and Jerick’s hackles rose. He couldn’t quite staunch the growl in the back of his throat. This had to be Dr. Branigan’s replacement.

  Stavis must have heard that growl because he smirked. “As you know, a prison needs a doctor to keep an eye on its crazy inmates.” His smirk widened. “And to study the freaky cyborgs with their broken brains.”

  Jerick clenched his teeth. There was nothing wrong with his brain, nothing that couldn’t be explained by the war. He’d survived years of terrifying space battles, of witnessing comrades dying in horrific ways, of being out on the front, isolated from the rest of humanity.

  “This one’s coming tomorrow. Shall I bring her by to see you before you’re executed? To study your tiny little brain? I trust you won’t kill this doctor.”

  Jerick hadn’t killed the last doctor, either, but he kept his mouth shut. Knowing he’d been slated for execution anyway, he had accepted the blame for that. The cyborg who’d lost control and killed the doctor merely had a sentence of life. A life stuck in here. Jerick wasn’t sure if he’d truly done the other man a favor. He had shortened his own remaining time, but maybe he’d done that on purpose, subconsciously hoping for an end to this hell. Maybe he was selfish rather than selfless, never quite managing to be the hero he’d once dreamed of being.

  “She’s a lot better looking than Branigan, don’t you think?” Judging by the way Stavis leered at the picture, he’d already taken it to his bunk with him.

  The woman—Russo—was attractive, though more in a cute and bookish way than a sexy and voluptuous one. Not that Jeric
k minded bookish women. If she hadn’t been wearing that damning lab coat, he might have taken thoughts of her to his bunk, too, if the hard shelf on the back wall could be called such. But that coat… and doctors in general… He loathed them. As if the military scientists who’d turned him into a cyborg, like Dr. Frankenstein putting together his mad creation, hadn’t been bad enough, Branigan with his drugs and experimentation had been too much for any man to accept without complaint. Or desire for revenge.

  “What do I care?” Jerick squinted at Stavis, not sure why he’d bothered to share the information, other than that the guard liked to torment him.

  “I thought you might want someone new to fantasize about during your last two nights alive.” Stavis smirked. “Or maybe you can volunteer your brain to whatever experiments she’s come to do on you mutants.”

  “Nobody touches my brain,” Jerick growled, not able to hide his distaste for those inmates who’d volunteered to let Branigan tinker with them in exchange for pitiful luxuries such as chocolate or a blanket.

  “You sure? Maybe she’d have the power to get your appointment with the needle pushed back, give you a few extra months to live so she can publish your brain’s crazy workings to the network.” Stavis smirked and nodded toward where the computer had once been integrated into Jerick’s cell, a way to communicate with the outside world. But he’d lost that after Branigan’s death. There was nothing except his own memories to entertain him now.

  “I’m not sucking up to some scientist so I can live another day.”

  “Have it your way, mutant.” Stavis tapped the tablet against his thigh, and it went limp, then rolled up. The guard walked farther down the corridor of cells and stopped to talk to someone else, another cyborg that he liked to torment.

  Jerick lay back on his shelf and closed his eyes, and the image of the woman filled his mind. He would probably never meet her, not if she came tomorrow, and his death was scheduled for the day after. But what if he did? Would he offer his brain for whatever dastardly research she’d come here to conduct? Here, where nobody cared about the pesky legalities of whether or not it was permitted to experiment on Colonial Citizens.

  No, he decided. He’d been a warrior his whole life, even on the streets where he had grown up. He would go to his death bravely without begging anyone for anything.

  1

  Ashes of heroes spread among the stars

  Some made it back, wrote up their memoirs

  Other souls too troubled were put behind bars

  ’til they need ’em again to fight future wars

  Dr. Skylar Russo listened to the haunting refrain of “Our Troubled Fate” by the Unknown Soldier as she watched the pilot guide their shuttle toward a hulking asteroid floating in space. From the outside, Antioch appeared no different from any of the other giant, lumpy rocks in the Delucion Mining Belt, but she knew exactly what waited for her inside, and she couldn’t help but cringe at her fate.

  The director of neuroscience had promised she would only spend six months in the place, but she wondered. She feared she’d complained one too many times, refused to play the game of politics and to suck up appropriately to get funding for research projects.

  There was a reason she’d gotten out of dealing with people and into pure research. People were… difficult. And nobody had ever accused her of being diplomatic and urbane. Of course, if the director had openly stood by her side instead of pretending he didn’t agree with all her objections…

  No, it didn’t matter now. She hadn’t been fired, at least. Just relocated. A long way from anywhere and to do “research” she didn’t believe in.

  She was supposed to study the cyborg inmates of Antioch, trying different drugs on them to see if there were any options that could help their fellow veterans acclimate to the civilian world now that the war was over. But the soldiers who’d received implants hadn’t had anything done to their brains. Their enhancements were all musculoskeletal. In six months, Skylar’s recommendation would doubtless be for them to receive the same therapies and medication that one would suggest for any veteran suffering from post-traumatic-stress disorder. In the meantime, she got to spend half a year of her life in this remote hellhole, surrounded by criminals.

  And when she returned? Would the next assignment be more palatable, or would her punishment go on?

  “Twenty minutes until we land in this fine paradise,” the pilot said over her shoulder, waving her hand grandiosely toward the view screen, as if they were flying into some utopian tourist destination rather than a secure prison filled with the worst felons in the United Earth Colonies. “If you want to stow yourself in your own luggage and throw away the lock code, it’s not too late.” The pilot—Keiko Sasaki, she’d introduced herself as—added a smirk.

  Skylar wasn’t surprised when their gazes met, the words meant for her alone. They were the only two women on the shuttle. The ten burly guards, many of them looking like they could be cyborgs themselves, were all male. Skylar wasn’t sure if they had all been assigned to protect the shuttle—if so, she worried about how secure the prison truly was—or if some of them were being transferred to tours of duty out here. Not unlike her, she supposed.

  “I don’t think I would fit in my luggage,” Skylar told Keiko.

  One of the guards looked at her, giving her a head to toe perusal, and she blushed. True, she wasn’t a giant of a woman, but she hadn’t brought any large bags along.

  The medical facility, she’d been promised, had everything she needed to run experiments. As opposed to the idea as she was, she would have to do something out here, or her superiors would notice. If she somehow discovered something worthwhile, would she be invited back to her old job at the university? Doing the neurological biotech work that she loved? Did she even want to go back, when it was clear she couldn’t be a researcher without also being a politician?

  She wondered how willing the inmates were to volunteer for experiments. The director, Dr. Martin, had been vague about that. He’d also been vague about what happened to the last scientist who’d been stationed out here. She’d read up on him—Dr. Branigan—briefly, and he’d sounded like more of a medical doctor than a researcher. Skylar hoped she wasn’t going to be expected to give shots and bandage owies.

  A hatch clicked open behind her, and she looked toward the small passenger cabins in the rear of the shuttle.

  The man—the cyborg—that was the shuttle’s only other passenger made his first appearance in the three days it had taken to cross the system. When he stepped out into the corridor and turned, his broad shoulders brushed the hatches on either side. His appearance—he wore a tweed suit and loafers—was far from that of the fleet officer he’d been during the war, but Captain Diego Cortez was a legend and a hero, and there were few people who didn’t know his past.

  Professor Cortez, Skylar reminded herself. He’d been a civilian again for the last three years, teaching literature and poetry at Cartagena Colony University, as he’d done before the war. He was one of those who’d successfully reintegrated into society, apparently unfazed by all he’d endured battling the Hrorak. He was also someone who’d been fighting—very vocally—for cyborg rights and rehabilitation, and had likely influenced those who had ultimately ordered Skylar sent out here.

  Cortez said nothing as he walked forward to look over Keiko’s head at the asteroid on the view screen. He didn’t so much as glance at Skylar.

  She told herself that was fine, that she wasn’t particularly interested in talking to him, even if he was handsome, with a strong jaw and a broad, muscled physique that the suit didn’t entirely hide. He wasn’t her type.

  Of course, her type had left her at the altar the year before.

  She snorted, giving a mental kick to Damian’s memory—and that of the big-boobed slut he’d run off with. Damian hadn’t cared that the woman hadn’t liked the network games he and Skylar had played together for years or that she hadn’t known anything about the programming work he did. All
that had mattered to him was that she was hot, had no life of her own, and was prepared to drop everything for him whenever he wished.

  Cortez looked down at Skylar for the first time.

  She realized he must have heard that snort, and she blushed, having no interest in explaining her past to him or why she’d sworn off dating for the last year.

  He frowned slightly as he scrutinized her. She refused to step back, though that was not an inviting facial expression, and he was nearly a foot taller than she. It would have been easy to be intimidated.

  “Skylar Russo.” She offered her hand because she didn’t know what else to do. Since he’d stayed in his cabin the whole trip, they had never introduced themselves.

  She didn’t think she could have offended him, unless he was judging her by her career and her work rather than anything she’d said or done on the shuttle. But what about her career could offend him? Up until two weeks ago, she’d been working on helping humans integrate computer chips and other circuitry into their brains.

  “Cortez,” he said, finally offering his own hand.

  She accepted it warily, half expecting him to wrap his fingers around hers with crushing strength. She knew the stats on the implants the military scientists had given their cyborgs, the fact that their hands had more gripping strength than the jaws of an alligator.

  But his touch was gentle, and he didn’t hold the handshake overly long. She found herself slightly disappointed in that. She also wondered why he’d introduced himself by surname rather than first name. Something he’d grown used to in the military?