Peyton 313 (17 page)

“I understand there are a number of variables we can’t determine. Maybe Peyton only likes me because they’re making him feel like he does. That potential reality hasn’t eluded my thinking either. We could debate the
maybes
all day long without being any closer to knowing what the double-wiring is doing to him. It’s been a failure in every cyborg I’ve seen it done to.”

“If Captain Elliot was able to decode the containment cage security, I’m guessing his mobile restraints are deactivated as well. Check them and see, Kyra. Do it now,” Nero ordered.

Hating to heed Nero’s command, but knowing it was the sensible thing to do, Kyra walked over to her desk. She quickly accessed the console and typed in the test command as she put her wrist controller over the scanner. All security codes were reported as still in place and showed no signs of tampering so far. The only further testing she could do would involve hurting Peyton without cause. She just wasn’t willing to do that to him when he was ghostbusting for her.

“I see nothing strange, Nero. If I test the links, Peyton’s going to want to know why I thought I needed to protect myself.”

Nero frowned. “Fine. But change the codes before you log out. You can do that without hurting him. Better yet—set them to randomly cycle. Knowing Peyton was sent to spy on you brings many things into question. It makes me wonder how many bio-tracking devices the UCN made Norton put in you.”

Kyra swung her gaze from the console to Nero. Bio-tracers? That got her full attention.

“Could they have done that without me knowing?”

She saw Nero turn from glaring at her naïveté to look at his friend. “Scan her for bugs, Brad.”

“If the app finds a bio-tracer, it’s going to hurt like hell to kill it,” Brad warned. “Maybe we should do it later—like much later—and out of Borg Man’s hyper-sensitive hearing range.”

“I helped Kyra build this lab. It’s ninety-five point eight percent soundproof. He won’t necessarily hear. Plus I’ll keep Kyra from calling out. Just do it, Brad. We were going to have to kill all the bio-tracers when she ran anyway. Let’s do it now to level her chances of escaping.”

Kyra’s face wrinkled in concern. “You genuinely think I’m being tracked by the UCN, don’t you? Up to now. . .all I’ve had was a theory.”

Nero walked to where Kyra stood staring at him. “What Brad uncovered on your surveillance recording convinced me I took your intuition about being investigated too lightly. I’m going to hold you now and put my hand over your mouth. But Kyra—finding a bio-tracer will just make your immediate departure more critical. Once the UCN figures out you’ve fallen off Norton’s tracking radar, they’ll waste no time coming after you. Of all people, you know how extreme they can be in their actions.”

Kyra nodded and frowned. “Peyton said I was very strategic for a scientist. Maybe I was fooling myself. Given what we’ve learned, I’m surprised Norton didn’t stop me before I worked on Marshall or Alex. If they’re tracking me, they obviously suspect what I’ve been doing.”

Nero put his arms around her and hugged. “No one has intervened yet because they are being strategic about not frightening the remaining cyborg creator into going underground. They wanted to know if you could succeed, which is what happened this time, Kyra. While not completely human, Captain Peyton Elliot is at least a cyborg who feels his emotions. If he hadn’t been double-wired, I believe your restoration efforts would have worked one hundred percent.”

“Thanks for at least saying that, Nero,” Kyra said, her gaze fixed on the ceiling as she sought a solution for Peyton. She tried not to flinch when a man’s hand covered her mouth for a second time that day.

What the hell was happening to her plans? And how did Nero know so much about what Norton was doing covertly to cyborgs? Hell—to its cyber scientists?

She watched Brad frown in resignation as he walked slowly toward her. He took a strange-looking scanner from his pocket that looked like the kind of portable hand-held used in medical facilities. After swiping through some screens, Brad ran the scanner over the front of her body covering every inch. Then coming closer to her, he turned the device to where she could see an outline of herself with three tiny, glowing red dots.

Brad shook his head. “I’m truly sorry, Dr. Winters. Looks like they have you tagged pretty good. Nero and I only had one each.”

Her. The outline of the body on the screen was her.
Kyra swallowed hard and nodded that she understood. She had three bio-tracers installed—which meant at some point Norton had inserted them without her even knowing they had done so.

Had they rendered her unconscious? How had they made her forget? Had Jackson had anything to do with it? To keep the unanswerable questions from driving her insane, she pulled Nero’s fingers down so she could speak.

“Do whatever you have to do to make sure no one can track me,” she ordered, feeling Nero’s fingers immediately slide back up and tighten again after she finished.

Sighing heavily, Brad turned the device back toward him, keyed in a few commands, and then leaned the front edge down to shoot a red beam at each spot where a bio-tracer appeared on her. The pain was as bad as Brad had warned it would be, but she gave Nero no cause for alarm about her calling out. She bore the torture silently thinking of Marshall, Alex, and Peyton bearing their reboot pain as stoically as they had. Nothing done to her could ever compare to what those men had endured. But by the time the last bio-tracer was completely dead, she was breathing hard and feeling nauseous.

“The program to kill the bio-tracers uses similar technology as a light saber. Or if you’re not familiar with that old movie reference, think of it as something similar to what cosmetologists use for cold laser body sculpting,” Brad explained.

His teasing didn’t ease much for her, but she knew Brad was trying to help. The younger man looked totally remorseful for having had to hurt her, but Kyra shook her head as Nero’s fingers slid away from her lips. “Thank you for killing them, Brad.”

When Brad nodded, Kyra tried her best to smile. It was hard with her stomach churning.

“You did great dealing with the pain, Dr. Winters. If you want, I can streamline your thighs to make them thinner. I did some cold laser lipo on my girlfriend’s stomach. Not to brag or anything, but she looks seventeen again.”

Kyra laughed weakly. “Thanks, but I don’t think I can handle any more laser work today.”

When Nero let her go, she grabbed the desk chair behind her to sit. Her legs were wobbly and she was feeling sick from the toxicity released when those things died.

She shook her head and laughed as she thought about Brad’s offer to give her thinner thighs. Oh yes, having thin thighs would solve all her problems—if she wasn’t a cyber scientist with a twenty million dollar price tag on her head.

“Do you think Peyton’s body is bugged too?” She directed the question at Brad instead of Nero. She was surprised when the junior tech shook his head firmly.

“No way, Dr. Winters. Bio-tracers would be redundant in a double-wired cyborg. Among other things, the second processor works like a homing beacon. That’s a normal part of being double-wired. Plus his cybernetics would neutralize the bio-tracers just as they were programmed to do with any sort of tracking device an enemy might install in him.”

“I see. Can I ask how you know so much about double-wiring?” Kyra was starting to worry that she’d under-estimated others while over-estimating her own knowledge of what was going on.

She watched Brad’s guilty gaze slide to Nero’s before coming back to hers.

“I was hoping I never had to admit this to you, but I helped double-wire a cyborg once. Not your Borg Man though, Dr. Winters. It was another one. Actually, it was the woman who killed Dr. Channing. They were going to dispose of her, but decided to double-wire her instead. She was the first female too.”

“I see. What kind of results did they get?” Kyra blinked and stared as she asked the question.

How much more had been going on at Norton that she hadn’t known about? Her aversion to the behavior modification system had obviously taken her out of the ‘need to know’ loop.

She felt even more sorry now for the woman who had avenged her in a way she never would have had the nerve to do herself.

“I’m not judging you for what Norton made you do. Please tell me. I’d really like to know.”

Brad shrugged and sighed. “There were some partial positives, but it seemed to cause that particular female cyborg to have more emotional bleed-thru episodes, like unexplained crying for no apparent reason. She also had a few really bad temper tantrums where she destroyed her containment cell furnishings. That’s all I know about her. The woman was returned to the redefinition area for some extended down time. No one knows what they’re planning to do with the cyborgs who are wired like that. She was in the lab where I was working on her when some military general came to evaluate her condition. He wasn’t very complimentary about our efforts. He mentioned the others were all failures too in his opinion—except for one. Nero and I think the one success was your Borg Man—I mean—Captain Elliott.”

“I see,” Kyra said again, but she didn’t. She didn’t see at all. And now she couldn’t talk to Peyton about the escalating situation either—unless she could figure out how to shut down the secondary wiring. “Something has to be done to stop this insanity. Someone has to stop Norton from trying to double-wire more cyborgs.”

“Nothing more needs to be done by you, Kyra. Double-hell no,” Nero insisted, his tone as adamant as he could make it. “I see where you’re going in your thinking, but it’s far too dangerous. Peyton Elliott could revert to some default set of codes and seriously hurt you—or worse.”

Kyra nodded and bit her lip. What Nero said was true, but there was also a chance she could get the rest of his wiring disconnected. If an original creator couldn’t accomplish stopping a double-wired cyborg—well that was knowledge the world needed as well, wasn’t it? She turned a calm gaze to one of the few men who truly ever loved her.

“Yes. What you say is true, Nero. But a partially restored cyborg in hand is better than us trying to gain access to another fully wired cyborg later on. Norton doesn’t want me dead. They want me working for them. They want me to continue helping them make organic robots out of the cyborgs. Well, I’m not going to do that and I won’t let Peyton be used to force my hand.”

There was silence in the lab as all three of them digested her declaration. Kyra lifted her chin and held Nero’s gaze. “I have to try and finish what I started.”

“I hate this, but I know it’s a waste of breath to keep arguing. So what more can we do to help you with your insanity?” Nero asked.

“Nothing. You’ve bought me more time and made sure I can escape undetected if it comes to that. I need you two to leave soon because Peyton thinks I came to kick you out. I want it to look that way. I don’t want to make him any more suspicious than he already is.”

Nero put a hand out to stop Kyra when she tried to walk away. “What are you going to do about him, Kyra? And about leaving? Do you even have a plan for what to do if your rogue Marine captain goes ape shit ballistic?”

Kyra reached out and took hold of Nero’s arm. “No. I don’t have all the answers yet. Now that we know the wrist and ankle restraints are still functioning, I’m not afraid of him losing control. So long as I retain the power to stop any attack he might make, I think I have to play this game until its end. If I win, Peyton wins—sort of. If I lose. . .? Well, let’s just hope my luck is better than that.”

Brad fished out a small round object from his pocket and held out his hand. “Here, Dr. Winters. This might come in handy if you have to make a run for it. It’s my latest invention—a tiny portable sweeper. Not much power in it, but it will shield you for a short call if you need to contact us from somewhere outside your shielded lab.”

Kyra took the small marble sized device. There was a tiny switch built into the side of it to turn it on. “Thank you, Brad. Thanks for all your help.”

“It’s my sincere pleasure to be on your rogue team,” Brad said, nodding.

Kyra relaxed a little when she saw Brad grinning like the kid he mostly still was. It made his scary knowledge of cyborg double-wiring slightly fade from her mind.

“
Rogue team?
I guess that’s as good a word as any to describe us. Brad, are you ever going to call me Kyra? You technically don’t work for me anymore.”

“I figure I can do that when you’re a hundred years old and I’m a lot older than I am now. Until then, I’d like to keep things mostly professional between us. That way if anything happens later on—like you decide you want a younger man to keep your bed warm—well then we’d have somewhere less professional to go with our relationship.”

Kyra laughed at Brad’s outrageously flirty comment, and then laughed more when Nero smacked Brad hard on the back of his head.

“Dude, stop hitting on Kyra. Stick to Gloria,” Nero ordered.

“Gloria?” Kyra repeated the name, smiling warmly at Brad who looked sheepish at the mention of another woman in his life.

Brad sighed and answered reluctantly. “Gloria is every man’s dream woman. Nero here is just jealous because I have a girlfriend and he doesn’t.”

Snorting, Kyra reached out to rub the tightness between Nero’s shoulder blades. “Well, Nero here could have lots of girlfriends if he wanted. He’s selective about women, which is a rare quality in a man.”

“Oh yeah, sure. If you don’t mind sleeping alone all the time,” Brad said, shrugging his shoulders.

Smiling at the simple male logic, Kyra opened the lab door as she listened to Nero haranguing Brad over his skirt chasing. She secretly thought Nero should do more of his own, but had long ago learned to keep opinions of that nature to herself.

“Out. Both of you heroes,” Kyra ordered, stopping just beyond the lab door. She saw Peyton quickly disappear from the hallway into the kitchen. Had he been eavesdropping through the lab door?

After exiting, Kyra ordered lab security to cycle entry codes, then she walked the men to the front door of her home. Nero surprised her by hugging her fiercely again. He also glared once in the direction of the kitchen before reluctantly leaving.