Cooper (3 page)

He pulled out his phone. "Amy, don't take this the wrong way, but I have to leave now. My…my condition is acting up and I have to get to my doctor. But I'd really like to see you again. Is there any chance that could happen?" The lie came too easily to his lips.

"Are you okay? Can I take you to your doctor? How can I help?" she sputtered, her face transformed by concern for him.

"No. I'm fine. I've got a little while before it'll get bad. But I do need to go. Can I have your number?"

She grabbed his phone and distractedly entered her details for him.

"I…I feel awful. Can't I do something?" she pleaded, handing back the phone.

He took her hand at an unnaturally fast speed and lifted it to his lips. Cursing inwardly, for yet again putting himself and his people at risk by openly demonstrating his abilities, he kissed the pale, long fingers.

"You can give me something to look forward to. Tell me you'll see me again."

"Oh, of course.”

He reluctantly let go of her hand and with a last smile goodbye, wheeled himself over to the counter to pay the bill. Before he left, he turned back and called, "Eat the rest of the brownies. What's a zit or two compared to enjoying a little bit of heaven?"

Cooper activated the hydraulic lift that carried his wheelchair from its place in the driver's position of his van to the floor of the secret parking lot specifically built beneath Scanlan Industries for the Sons.

As soon as his chair was released from the mechanism, he wheeled off, letting it automatically put the lift away and close and lock the van door. Modern tech was a wonderful thing to behold.

He could have had a
you-beaut
chair with all the bells and whistles if he'd wanted it. But he liked having at least half his body functioning optimally. So the workout he got pushing himself around was okay by him. He also spent about an hour a day in the gym keeping his leg muscles from atrophying. Back home, his mum used to do the workouts on his legs with him. Since moving to Silicon Valley and joining the Scorpio Sons, he'd had specially designed machines to do that for him. So although his legs might not work, they didn't look like matchsticks on the bottom of a well-toned torso and arms.

Putting in a call to Chase and Caleb, he headed for the IT lab Caleb used. It was a large room filled with more screens and computer gear than Coop had ever seen in one place before. Scanlan Industries didn't stint when it came to having every toy that came onto the market; or hadn't yet made it to the market, for that matter.

By the time he got to the IT lab Chase had arrived and was sitting across the desk from Caleb. Colt was there too, which surprised him. Coop hadn't been aware that he’d returned from Barbados already.

"What's up?" Chase said as soon as Coop entered the room.

All three almost identical faces looked over at him. Having been part of the Scorpio Sons for six years, almost as long as it had been in existence, he was used to seeing his own face everywhere he went. He'd been one of the first Sons brought in by Chase, who had founded the organisation of genetically engineered cloned warriors seven years ago. Maybe it was a bit creepy, seeing yourself in the faces of other men, but to him these different versions of himself represented the different paths not taken in his life.

Any one of these men's lives could have been his, but for a twist of fate. If he'd been the baby chosen straight from the gestation tube to be the son of Scanlan, then he might have grown up to be the serious, mature leader of the Sons, rather than Chase. Or he might have gone to an unconventional family in the Deep South who would have raised him to be a hacker with a chip on his shoulder, like Caleb. Then again, if he'd been really unlucky, he might have gone to a Canadian couple, who later died, and found himself in foster care. His stay there would have been short because at seven years of age his cat would have been activated. For the next sixteen years he would then have lived on the streets, a shadow without a home or identity.

And these were only a few of the possible lives he could have lived. At last count, forty one clones had been brought in to join the Scorpio Sons. Forty-one out of the possible one hundred rescued from death that day in 1988, when the Guild had issued the Termination Order on the illegal cloning experiments.

Each of those one hundred babies, genetically engineered to become super-soldiers for the Guild, had instead been secreted out and given to Résistance members around the world, to raise as their own. No one knew to whom, or where those babies went; which made for a hell of a challenge regrouping them once they reached eighteen.

It still amazed him that his adoptive parents, who owned an Australian sheep station in the far west of New South Wales, should have known anything about the world-wide Résistance group, no less been members of it. But the loosely organised group had networks of cells everywhere.

Set up millennia ago, to fight the alien breed that had invaded their world at a time when humanity was still in its infancy, the Résistance had achieved little beyond information gathering since the enemy had gone underground. That was, until the Sons joined them. Now, for the first time, they had a chance of defeating the creatures before they could destroy Earth completely.

The Résistance had gleaned much information on their enemy over the millennia, by one means or another. They knew those aliens, called the Guild, had come to Earth to colonise the planet when their last world became uninhabitable from their excesses. Now, after thousands of years of secret habitation, the Guild had almost sucked Earth dry, too. Once there was nothing left, they planned to leave for greener pastures. If humanity let them.

"Colt, I didn't expect to see you back so soon," Coop said, instead of answering his leader.

As far as the outside world was concerned, Chase and Coop were twins separated at birth. And in many ways they acted like brothers, Coop being far less prone to immediately jump to attention when Chase gave an order than the rest of the Sons. In fact, sometimes Coop flouted authority, just because he could.

The uncanny resemblance between them, as they worked upstairs at Scanlan Industries, was therefore accepted. The rest of the brothers, who lived and had their HQ below the main hi-tech electronics corporation, rarely went upstairs. If one of them did, they passed as a third brother, who liked to change his appearance, a lot.

It was a logistic nightmare keeping secret a small army of identical clones, but that was what Chase was endeavouring to do. And so far he'd been successful.

"Yeah, well, Alice is a clever little thing and pulled off her part fast and effectively. We'd barely unpacked, before the Sons were raiding the ship and taking Karl Rothmen into custody. We flew back for the trial."

Coop hadn't been keeping up with all the ins and outs of this mission. He was the Sons' medical researcher and was only brought in when some new discovery came to light concerning the Sons; or if a special drug was needed, like the lipstick he'd created for Connor's mate. That lipstick had contained a very strong vomitory, which would make anyone who kissed her instantly sick. Alice had obviously managed to use it on Rothmen, after she got close enough to him to download the incriminating files he kept on a medallion around his neck.

"Damn, that must have been disappointing." He grinned, knowing they were all only too glad to be away from a shipload of Guild.

"We were all devastated." Colton grinned sarcastically.

"So what gives?" Chase said again, a little impatiently this time. He was not a man who liked to be pulled away from his work for any reason other than an emergency.

"Something is happening to me. I needed to run it by you fellas, to see if you had an idea what it is."

Cooper sighed heavily and looked around at the faces one more time, knowing he'd put off the unavoidable for as long as he could. He didn't like the possibilities that might eventuate after this conversation. Maybe he'd have to be contained somewhere, in case he got uncontrollably dangerous.

"Us? You’re the resident expert on all things Son-related. You've got Regis' notes and files. You've been studying us for six years. You even wanted to put our mates under the microscope," Colt said with an edge in his voice.

Oh, so that idea
hadn't
gone down as well as it seemed during the conference call from London. Or maybe Colt had been thinking about those tests ever since, and had decided he didn’t like that plan. It wasn't as if Cooper was going to put them in cages and perform inhuman experiments on them. He just wanted to understand their healing ability. So far, all they knew about this latest discovery was that the women seemed to have only one mate and could heal that mate of anything from minor injuries, like a bite, to major ones, like a bullet wound. But as only two of the specially engineered female embryos had yet been discovered as fully matured women, they were still only making guesses about their potential for the Sons.

"What's happening to me is an anomaly. Nothing in the case studies I've done on all of you, or the files I have on the experiments, gives me an idea about what's going on."

"So, spit it out Coop. What's happening?" Chase said, a little less impatient now as he sensed something important raising its head.

"I have never exhibited the kind of intensity the rest of you do. I'm a fairly balanced, easy-going type of fella. Nothing gets to me, except maybe the cruelty I witness first-hand. Like the kittens I found in the hessian sack in the dumpster at the back of the building. That got to me."

"You do have a thing for cats. How many strays you feeding now?" Caleb asked in his Southern drawl, a smug grin splitting his face in the semi-darkness. His blue-tinted modified-Mohawk always looked more unnatural in the IT lab, lit as it was by only the computer screens around him. The tribal markings, on the other hand, which were tattooed on his body and cut into his hair on either side of his head, became less noticeable in the light.

"Ten cats. But that's beside the point. Even that act of cruelty aroused only mild anger in me. I've always assumed that whatever coding created your passionate intensity somehow glitched in me: one of the copy number variations; a piece of the code missing or another bit duplicated. You know how it works. Although we're all grown from identical, cloned DNA material, we aren't quite identical."

He saw Chase begin to tap the table-top; Coop was taking too long to get to the point.

"But tonight I started to feel an emotional intensity I've never experienced before. I got furious, oddly hyper-protective, and edgy as hell. I felt like sodium bicarbonate that just had water added to it. I was ready to blow."

"Were you in a dangerous situation? Maybe your cat was close to activating," Chase offered, his eyes suddenly glued, un-blinking, to Coop in that uncanny way they all had. It came from their panther DNA.

He was the only Son who'd never had his cat activated. Usually it happened around puberty, when emotions became unstable. For some, like Colt, it happened earlier. The cats came to life when intense emotions were experienced, like fear or anger, which called to the cat for help. For him, suddenly knocked unconscious and injured in a car accident at ten, and then over-protected for the rest of his childhood and adolescence, his cat had never had the chance to be called on. He'd started to think his never would be. That its absence was part of his glitch.

"I was drinking coffee with a friend. I was happy and relaxed. No danger, no possible threat from anywhere," he answered, shaking his head.

"You said
oddly protective
. Who were you oddly protective of? Not another stray?" Caleb asked, only half-joking this time.

"Just the girl I was having coffee with. I met her at a…performance we both attended. She's had a hard time of it, and I got furious that someone had made her feel so bad about herself. I wanted to kill the bastard." He paused and reflected on his suddenly escalating emotions.

"Huh, I still feel the echo of that fury, even now. But I'm okay. I'm back in balance again. Maybe it was an anomaly and won't happen again. But I had to run it by you, just in case I suddenly turned cat for no reason and started tearing people apart. Because there seems to be no trigger like there was for you fellas, I'm worried that it makes me… a risk. What if I lost it upstairs? You fellas could protect yourselves down here, but my lab assistants up there would be helpless."

For a moment everyone sat silently thinking.

Colt then looked up and met his gaze. "This girl you met. How do you feel about her? Is she anyone special?"

Coop shrugged. "I don't know how I feel about her yet. I just met her. But I was interested. I may not be sexually active like the rest of you, but I do have sexual thoughts about pretty girls. So, yeah, I was sexually attracted to her. I even asked for her number, which was a first for me."

He ran out of things to say. Talking about his sexual inadequacies, caused by the fact he was pretty much dead from the waist down, wasn't high on his To Do list. Oh, he'd very occasionally get some life in his dick, but never enough to ejaculate. His problems were caused by nerve damage to his spine. But knowing the cause didn't make it any easier to deal with though.

However, his lack of words wasn't entirely caused by his sexual insecurities. It was also due to his newly discovered feelings for Amy. How could he put into words the odd connection he felt with this complete stranger? He thought it was likely just the shared pain and desperation that had driven them both to that con-artist tonight. But it felt like more than that.

"So you've never been interested enough in any other girl to ask for her number?" Caleb pressed as if he'd found an interesting virus in the coding of a program.

"Look, we aren't all alley cats like you, okay? I have more important things on my mind than pussy. Like saving the world?" Did he actually sound as defensive as he felt?

Caleb grinned and sat back, crossing his tattooed arms across his well-defined chest. "Our little brother is growing up, ain't that cute. Cooper and …What's her name, brother?"

"Amy Hays. And shut the fuck up, arse-hole. I've had about enough of your brand of humour for one night. This is serious. I'm a risk to the people I work with. To… To Amy. I need answers not childish jokes."

"Amy?" Colt repeated the name as if it was something special. He looked across at Chase. "Alyssa, Alice and now Amy? Is her name a coincidence or is she one of ours? Maybe just being in her proximity is activating Coop's cat."

Cooper stared at Colt as if he'd grown a second head. What was he on about? Alyssa, Alice and Amy. Was he having a go at him too? What had Colt's and Connor's mates got to do with a girl he just met?