Captured by the Cyborg (3 page)

Let him wiggle out of that one, because he wasn’t the ordinary Terran he tried to pass himself off as. Homme was a cyborg. A computer-enhanced human. A sensate could pick them out a parsec away.

Okay, maybe not that far, but one could tell from a handshake. She’d learned Terrans in business situations greeted each other that way, and that a firm one was preferable to the dead-fish kind. With a strong grip on his hand, she’d sensed his cybernetics.

She’d been tempted to probe his head to search for clues as to what he was looking for in an employee, perhaps to plant a suggestion that she was the right candidate. If he had been an android, lacking self-awareness, she could have slipped in and slid out without him ever realizing he’d been altered. But he was more human than computer, and he would have known in an instant. And, in the end, she hadn’t needed the extra edge.

She’d feared he might have caught on to her secrets and lies and rejected her, but then he offered her the job! She could have cried with relief. Kissed him with happiness.

No, never that.

His handshake, which could have crushed her fingers if he’d been so inclined, was all the contact she wanted, thank you very much. Human males were taller than Faria men, and Homme towered at least a half a head over everyone on site. His biceps alone had to be nearly the circumference of her waist. She’d never met a man that large. His office, though generous-sized, had seemed small the way his intimidating bulk and presence took up the space.

Better to keep her distance and avoid him as much as possible. He might ask her more questions. He’d hired her, but that didn’t mean she’d escaped all suspicion, and recent events had taught her to maintain her guard. Probably, since Dale Homme owned Moonbeam, he didn’t interact with workers on a daily basis anyway. Charlie had already introduced her to March, her future supervisor. As long as she did her job and didn’t arouse suspicion, she wouldn’t have cause to see Homme very often. He had more important things to do than to concern himself with a lowly troubleshooter. A new hire.

Her stomach rumbled with a hunger she hadn’t experienced in a long time. Fear and stress had all but eradicated her appetite. Another reason for the loose-fitting military garb: hide how thin she’d become. She glanced at the monitor on the wall. Four more hours until dinner.

It felt good to be hungry again.

And safe.

From his office, Dale watched Illumina wheel a cart of diagnostic equipment into a cabinet and then amble awkwardly through the shop toward the mess hall. As if she sensed his scrutiny, she glanced up at the windows. He had the urge to duck out of sight, but he held his ground.
She can’t see you.
She turned away and continued on.

Again, her stiff gait struck him as odd, but what caught and held his attention was that incredible hair, the slightness of her frame, the ridiculous attire. Her.

You’re a perv, Homme
.
What was it they used to call men who spied on women? Peeping Toms?
The glass wall allowed him to observe
the rotation as the vehicles moved from station to station. He couldn’t count the number of times in the week since Illumina had come on board that he found himself watching for her.

He needed neither his cybervision nor her distinctive hair to find her amidst the bustling beehive of activity. His human senses were attuned to her, his gaze zooming in like a computer fixing on programmed coordinates.

He had to stop this shit. She was his employee. Messing with the staff violated personal and professional ethics and would be bad for business and morale.
Step away from the window, then.

He didn’t. He waited until she disappeared into the dining room before he returned to his desk. Hiring her had been a mistake. He’d checked further into her background and discovered she’d faked more than credentials; she’d manufactured an entire life. From what he could tell, Illumina Smith did not exist. She’d handed him more than enough grounds for immediate dismissal.

She hadn’t lied about her abilities though. After her first day, he’d checked with March, her supervisor, and discovered that she performed exceptionally well, flying through orientation with a natural knack for programming, as if computer code were her native language.

That wasn’t why he hadn’t fired her yet. He kept her because…

Because although he had a microprocessor embedded in his brain and robotic nanocytes in his blood received and analyzed data in a blink of an eye, human gut instinct told him to hold off on the termination. Honed by his training and experience as a field agent with Cyber Operations, intuition had saved his ass more times than he’d ventured to the window in the past three days.

She was in trouble.

She didn’t act like it. He couldn’t prove it. But he felt it.

He was a sucker for an underdog. Deceptio’s security had to come first, but with that assured, he did what could he could to give people a leg up. Moonbeam was one of the few employers who would hire Arcanians. Having earned a reputation for thievery, Arcanians found it difficult to find honest work. So they resorted to theft. A vicious cycle, which he had tried to break by offering them gainful employment. Arcanians and Faria with secrets weren’t the only hard-luck cases he’d hired.

Hey, boss, Baby’s coming in,
Charlie hailed him.

Dale sat up straight in his chair.
Any word on how she did?

Haven’t heard, but Giorgio was gone longer than usual. I don’t know if that’s positive or negative.

Dale sighed. Negative would be his guess. The fucking ship had probably stalled out again, and Giorgio had trouble restarting the engines. Once they’d had to send a tow craft to drag it back in.
Okay, thanks. I’ll come down.

* * * *

The descender, loaded with the spacecraft, came to a stop then rotated. A dolly towed the craft off the lift, and then the docking bridge rolled toward it. Dale gripped the railing as the tool connected and locked into place. The hatch on the ZX7M sprang open, and a small, wiry man in a flight suit crawled out. Giorgio’s expression looked grimmer than a Harkleon winter.

Fuck. Again?
If he didn’t have so much time and money invested, he’d strip the damn ship of its electronics and haul the hull to a recreation station for children to play with. “Well?” He braced for the bad news.

Giorgio’s shoulders slumped, and he shook his head. His lips began to twitch, and then his face split into a wide grin. “She flew like a bolt of lightning.”

Dale blinked. “You’re shitting me.”

“Not a single hiccup. She passed the maneuvers at the top of the range. I don’t know what magic Diagnostics and Repair pulled out of their hats, but Baby can
fly
. Better and faster than we hoped.”

Laughter snorted out Giorgio’s nose. “You should have seen your face when you thought it had failed again.”

“You’re a real comedian.” He could find the humor in most things, but his patience had been pushed to the edge by the spacecraft’s repeated failures.

“I’ll do some more test flights to verify today’s results weren’t a fluke, but I think the problem is behind us now.” Giorgio could be a pain in the ass sometimes—most of the time really—but there was no doubting his dedication to his job.

“That’s a good idea. We have to be sure.” After four failures, they needed more than one check mark in the success column. Giorgio probably itched to fly Baby when he could enjoy himself and not have to worry about being cast adrift in space.

According to tattletale computer logs, Giorgio occasionally conducted non-test flights and non-regulation maneuvers in violation of company policy. However, he had rocket fuel for blood and was the
best pilot Moonbeam had. If the space jockey sneaked off on a lark every now and then, Dale could turn a blind eye to the infraction to keep his most experienced pilot happy.

After they descended the docking scaffold, Giorgio swaggered toward employee mess, and Dale went to hunt down March. The Diagnostics and Repair supervisor sat at his console grinning at a screen full of numbers. “She passed!” March spun around and pumped his fist in the air.

“I heard. Good job!” Dale said. “What was the problem?”

“A shield virus. It changed the computer code, but made it look like the code was correct. “I’ll shoot you the test data,” he said.

“How did you manage to find it?”

“I didn’t. Your new hire did.”

“Illumina? Isn’t she still in orientation?”

“Not anymore. She breezed through training in a couple of days. We’d discussed the problems with the ZX7M in class, and she asked for a peek at the craft. She came back and reported it fixed. I had my doubts, but she insisted, so Giorgio took the craft for a spin. It’s a wonder she found it. Shield viruses are almost impossible to detect.”

* * * *

In the employee dining room, Illumina tucked into a platter piled with enough fruits, vegetables, and nut patties to feed two people twice her size. Did she always eat that much or was she compensating? She looked too thin, despite the camouflage of her anachronistic attire. Was that much food typical for a Faria? Maybe flying burned a lot of energy.

Except Illumina didn’t fly. She was lucky to be alive. Genetic and biomed info on Faria was scant, but it was common knowledge that removal of their wings resulted in fatal hemorrhage. Against the odds, she’d survived.

He strode toward her. Her eyes widened before she shuttered them behind a neutral expression. “May I join you?” he asked.

“You’re the boss.” She jutted her chin at a vacant chair.

Dale swung it around and straddled it.

She set down her fork.

“Eat,” he said. “Don’t let me stop you.”

“No, it’s all right.” She folded her hands in her lap.

“How are you getting along?” He tried not to stare at her plate. How could someone so small consume so much? Of course, she wasn’t eating now; he’d interrupted her meal.

“Fine.”

“Better than fine, I’d say. I heard you fixed Baby.”

“Baby?”

“That’s what we call the ZX7M.”

“Why?”

“Because she’s cranky.”

“Oh. That makes sense.”

“I wanted to thank you for an extraordinary job.” Mostly he wanted an excuse to seek her out.

“You’re welcome,” she said.

“My cyber team is top-notch, but we might never have discovered the shield virus.”

“You have to know what to look for.” She ducked her head, but not before a flash of luminescence lit up her cheeks.

“What
did
you look for?” No idle question. If a spacecraft had been infected with a shield virus, it could happen on another. All the techs had to be trained.

She looked up. Her face seemed to glow from within. “The only thing that was left. Your team had eliminated every other possibility.”

Simple enough, except his top cyber experts had been stumped for months. Even if her qualifications had been real, they wouldn’t add up to the sum of his team’s experience.

“How’s everything else? The barracks, the food—” he glanced at her plate and then scanned the mess hall. “Have you gotten to know any of the other employees?” Small groups of people were eating together, talking, laughing, but she’d chosen to sit alone.

Already ramrod straight, she stiffened further. “Do you always take such an interest in your workers?”

Friendliness and approachability encouraged crew members to bring problems to his attention. He couldn’t fix what he didn’t know about, and he much preferred dealing with small issues before they ballooned into crises. He would have commended Illumina for her contribution in any case, but more than positive employee relations had motivated him to seek her out. Truth? He had jumped at the chance to see her.

To touch her, to tangle his hands in her hair, to kiss…

Dale stood up and righted the chair. “I take an interest in my shop. I won’t keep you any longer. Enjoy the rest of your meal.” He stalked away. Employees waved and shouted greetings, and he stopped by their tables to chat for a bit. On his way out the door, he halted. He spun on his heel and went back to her table.

He bent his head to her ear and said in a low voice, “If you’re running from something, you’d be better served if you tried to blend in by joining the other workers for a meal, instead of sitting alone.” He strode out of the mess hall.

* * * *

Alarm ratatatted in her chest with a too-familiar beat. Illumina dragged in air and grabbed for calming thoughts.
Don’t panic. Doubt isn’t the same as knowledge.

She’d learned that lesson well. There’d been suspicion about Alonio, but he’d erased the facts, and without concrete knowledge…well, here she was.

She pushed her plate away, appetite replaced by queasiness. Hunger had evaporated the instant she’d sensed the object of her obsession had entered the mess hall. She had a visual eidetic memory, and Dale’s image had burrowed into her mind, interrupting an already-fitful sleep with sexual dreams. Disturbing and inappropriate, but at least they crowded out the nightmares.

If she had one wish—beyond guaranteed safety—it would be a night of nothingness, to lay her head on the pillow and drift into the void until morning—or what passed for morning in a sublunar environment.

Way to go
.

Only on Deceptio a week, already she’d screwed up the plan to avoid attention. She’d drawn her supervisor’s notice by whizzing through his little training program, fixed an “unfixable” spacecraft, and topped it all off by being rude to the big boss and furthering his suspicion.

Illumina studied her co-workers. She hadn’t meant to be standoffish, but the idea of engaging in conversation filled her with dread. The other workers would be curious, would ask where she’d come from, where she’d worked in the past—what could she say that wasn’t a lie? Every conversation led further into deception. Each lie provided another opportunity to trip up. She’d already proven how easy that was.

But Homme was right. Distance invited gossip, so she would do as he suggested and introduce herself to a tableful of employees and ask to join their group.