Ghost stared at the far wall of his holding chamber, trying to ignore the two puny human males chattering in front of him.
“You’d think they’d design cyborgs to talk.” The smallest male gazed up at him.
“They don’t talk.” The other male nicked Ghost in the hip with a dagger. “Not unless they’re asked a question or acknowledging a command. This one is damaged. It doesn’t even do that.”
Ghost, accustomed to their torture, didn’t react. Blood dripped down his leg.
“The silence is eerie.” The smallest male’s lips twisted. “Remember when Rog stuck that dagger up its ass and sliced it to pieces? It didn’t make a sound.”
He said that as though it was a fond memory. The two of them enjoyed hurting beings, hurting him.
Hatred, pure and thick, pulsed through Ghost’s circuits. If given the command, he’d rip their heads off.
But he wouldn’t be given that command. The humans were his masters and although he didn’t know much, his organic brain shattered, he did know he couldn’t act without their orders.
“The Captain was pissed when Rog did that.” The other male dragged a dagger over Ghost’s bare ass, leaving a trail of pain. “He likes it tight when he uses it.”
Ghost’s fury expanded, encompassing every being on the warship. He wanted to kill them all, tear them apart limb by limb.
Instead, he gazed at the gray wall panels, his expression blank, his lips pressed together. The two males’ voices weren’t the only sounds he heard. Millions of beings talked inside his reinforced skull.
What’s the quickest way to kill a Mantidae?
In the Homeland, every cyborg is free.
I increased my kill rate by thirty-two this planet rotation.
Some females have golden hair.
Fe-males. Ghost silently turned that word over in his mind. Fe-males. That meant something to him, invoked emotions within his soul. He didn’t know why it was important but it was.
“We’ll have to clean it up after the battle.” The shorter male wrinkled his nose. “The captain doesn’t like it to be dirty.”
“C Models are disgusting.” The other male curled his top lip. “The newer models have been programmed to utilize the cleaning cloths.”
“This one used to do that. It is malfunctioning.”
“Why doesn’t the captain have it decommissioned and order a new one?”
Decommissioned was another word Ghost still retained. It meant pain, death.
The end of his suffering.
“There’s been an issue with supply. For now, we’re stuck with it.” The shorter male inclined his head toward Ghost. “There are benefits. I doubt the captain would allow us to use a new model for target practice.”
“True.” The taller male moved toward the doors. “I’m itching to test my new long gun. Downing the rebel battle station should earn us that reward.”
“Their commander is a female.” The other male sneered. “Defeating her will take mere moments.”
They exited, the doors shut behind them, and Ghost was left in solitude yet again. He had a vague recollection of a time when he wasn’t alone, a time when he had been surrounded by warriors like himself.
A scene flashed through his mind. A battlefield strewn with bodies, gouged faces, silver frames showing through tattered flesh, eyes with their lights burned out.
Pain surged along his circuits, coiling around his heart, squeezing, squeezing. Ghost hastily deleted the image and focused on the present, on the gray walls, the tiled floor.
There was a space inside him, as though something was missing. A part of himself had been severed. He gazed down. His arms and legs remained attached. He balled his fingers into huge fists. Physically, he appeared to be all there.
Yet the sensation remained. He wasn’t whole. He was defective.
Ghost stared at the wall and listened to the chatter in his head, the discussions of battle strategy, the musings about females and the Homeland.
The warship tilted to the right. He widened his stance, bracing himself. The floor under his bare feet leveled.
The vessel jerked, steadied, jerked again.
Were they in a battle? Ghost breathed deeply, smelling nothing, no blood, no projectile residue. No one gave him orders to attack, to kill.
He wanted to end lifespans. That was his one remaining function in the universe. Ghost remembered having another purpose, a more worthy purpose. He couldn’t recall what that was. All he knew now was death, pain, violence.
Ghost.
He straightened and growled. One of the voices inside his skull knew his name.
Ghost, are you functional? Another voice asked.
That question held the strength of an order. He had to respond. Ghost searched his organic brain for the words. It had been solar cycles since he’d last spoken. Ugh. That was all he could manage.
He’s damaged.
He might be too damaged to assist us.
Assist, Ghost repeated. If the task required action, not talking, he could complete it.
There was a stretch of silence.
He’d failed the voices as he’d failed…he couldn’t remember who he had failed. Ghost’s shoulders slumped. He stared at the wall, waiting for a command.
Ghost, we need your help. The first voice returned.
Ghost lifted his head. Ugh. He’d help them.
Open your holding chamber, warrior.
Ghost glanced at the doors. They were closed. His gaze shifted to the control panel to the right. He placed his hands on the flat surface, ashamed of how dirty, how unkempt his fingers were.
Nothing happened.
The power to open the doors was within him. He was certain of that. Ghost narrowed his eyes at the control panel and concentrated.
The doors remained closed.
Ghost, I have to hack into your machine. The voice stated an intention. Do I have your consent?
Machine. That was the piece of him that was missing. He’d shut that part down. There was a reason he did that, though he couldn’t remember what that reason was.
Ugh. He tried to communicate his misgivings to the voice.
The voice didn’t listen to him. His processors were poked and prodded.
They whirred, reviving. A tingling spread over him, pricks of pain, as though pins and needles were being stuck into his skin. His body tried to resist the invasion.
The voice, Ghost could now identify him as Ace, was too strong. The K Model cyborg deftly reconnected Ghost’s processors, undoing the separation it had taken the C Model almost a solar cycle to fully accomplish.
Images, memories, words flooded Ghost’s organic brain. It was too much, overwhelming.
Hurtful.
The first face to dominate his thoughts was of a young female. She had chubby cheeks, brown curly hair, had four or five solar cycles. The little female clung to her mother’s hand and stared up, up, up at Ghost with awe and wonder.
Ours. Ghost felt that truth deep in his soul. The little female belonged to him in the same way the K Model cyborg belonged to him. It was his role to protect her.
He didn’t know how.
If he swept her into his arms and ran, carrying her to safety as he desperately wanted to, he’d be disobeying orders. Worse than that, he’d be acting on his own.
The Humanoid Alliance would know cyborgs weren’t mindless killing machines. They would realize cyborgs weren’t completely under the humans’ control.
His brethren, the cyborgs standing by his side, perhaps all the cyborgs under Humanoid Alliance command, would be deemed defective and killed.
He held the little female’s gaze, watching, waiting for an opportunity to save her.
“Kill them,” a male officer told his subordinate.
The male looked at the officer and then at the two unarmed females. He gulped, his Adam’s apple bobbing. His face was pale. His gun shook.
“Fuck.” The officer grabbed his subordinate’s gun. “I’ll do it.”
It took all of Ghost’s willpower not to move, not to grab the little female.
The officer pulled the trigger. The projectile struck the little female in the forehead, killing her instantly. Her eyes, remaining trained on Ghost, widened. She fell. Her mother screamed.
The images were memories, date-stamped as occurring many hundreds of solar cycles ago, but his processors had captured them perfectly, every detail intact; he felt the death as though it had just happened.
Ghost howled through his transmission lines, bellowing with grief, the force of his failure hitting him hard. She had belonged to him and he’d allowed her to die.
The officer shot the mother and handed the gun back to his subordinate. “That’s how you do it.” He smirked.
Ghost’s urge to kill increased.
The scene changed.
A blue fur-covered female hid behind a downed ship. Projectiles zinged around her, puncturing the metal panels, blasting holes in her makeshift shield.
Ours. That knowledge filled Ghost with dread. The Humanoid Alliance officers swaggering behind him would have spotted her. She could be seen even with their ineffective human visual system. There was no way to hide her, to save her.
The female bravely fired back at them, earning his admiration. She was strong, worthy of his protection.
Again, he didn’t know how to safeguard her. His machine evaluated and discarded solutions.
Having no other option, Ghost marched toward her, his apprehension increasing with every step. His cyborg brethren were positioned to his right and to his left. They formed a line of warriors no humanoid could defeat.
His stomach twisted. She would die.
He would fail her, fail his kind. No Humanoid Alliance torture could equal this, knowing a being he was destined to protect would be harmed, killed.
When the projectile hit her in the chest, he emotionally crumpled, gutted, his insides hollowed out. The pain was acute, fresh, slicing through him like a blade.
And it didn’t end.
Failure after failure, death after death, was revisited, the agony building. The females had all belonged to him. And they were all dead.
Because he had failed them. Guilt, sorrow, grief cascaded over Ghost.
There was nothing he could do to stop it, no steps he could take to save the dead females, to reverse the damage he’d done.
Ace, the K Model cyborg, repaired his finger and palm interfaces, reconnecting the circuits. Ghost’s nanocybotics, the part of him that was responsible for his faster-than-human healing, were stimulated by the activity. Energy surged through him.
That increased his frustration over his failures, escalated his pain. Some of that emotion flowed into rage, his anger directed at himself and at his Humanoid Alliance handlers. The Humanoid Alliance had given the orders for the killing, had participated in it.
Ghost rumbled, yearning to take action, to ease his conscience.
Ace accessed the warship’s systems through Ghost’s interface. The doors slid open.
Ghost lurched forward, looked to the right and to the left. There were no guards. No one to give him commands. No one to punish.
Kill every being you see, Ace instructed.
Kill. Yes, he would kill them all. Then the pain inside him would dissipate. Then he’d be fully repaired, his human and his machine halves at peace.
Ghost flung back his head, released a roar, and rushed forward, searching for his first target. One of his handlers entered the corridor. The male’s eyes widened. He turned and ran in the opposite direction.
He wasn’t fast enough. Ghost moved at cyborg speed, faster than any human. He grabbed the male. The handler squawked.
Not having any weapons, Ghost bent his head. Using his teeth and hands, he ripped off the male’s skull, killing him quickly. That didn’t dampen the images of the females. He tore off the male’s arms and legs. The females’ faces remained in his thoughts.
He shredded the torso, the metallic taste of blood filling his mouth. It splattered over his naked form and oozed between his toes. Ghost painted the walls crimson, took the male apart until there was nothing left to grip.
The rage inside him didn’t dissipate. It grew until all he saw was red, until the only word in his processors, in his organic brain, was kill.
Ghost stormed through the warship, tracking beings by their scent. He battered through doors and walls to get to his targets, ending their lives as he had ended his handler’s life, quickly, brutally.
They couldn’t escape him and they deserved their fate. All of the males had tortured him, had delighted in causing him pain. They would pay for that, would pay for not allowing him to protect the females.
In Ghost’s damaged mind, the females’ deaths, his failure, and the males’ torment were bundled, mixed together in a volcanic vortex of emotion. Solar cycles of frustration gushed out of him, a red, heated, flow of rage, of violence.
The human warriors shot at him. He leaned toward their guns, embracing the agony. It was what he deserved. Projectiles riddled his form, biting into his skin. His nanocybotics hummed, struggling to heal him.
He continued killing. Beings screamed and begged for mercy. Their pleas didn’t penetrate his processors, didn’t reach his brain. He had been given an order—to kill every being he saw. He wouldn’t fail Ace, one of his own, not as he had failed the females. He ended the males’ lives with no hesitation.
The shuddering of the warship stopped as the corridors and the chambers flooded with blood. It was more than Ace’s order fueling Ghost, more than vengeance. The Humanoid Alliance had manufactured him for this, had designed him for killing, and it satisfied his machine to serve its purpose.
He hunted down every being on board the vessel.
Kill. Kill. Kill. He concentrated on that command, tearing the males into pieces with his mouth and hands. Blood streamed down his chest, scented the air.
He ravaged the last male. The warship was eerily quiet. Only the voices in his head remained.
They were fellow cyborgs, his processors relayed. The warriors were positioned on other ships, on planets. Some were free. Some remained slaves of the Humanoid Alliance.
None of them gave him his next order. Ghost stared down at the gore. Ace, the K Model cyborg, was silent. He’d withdrawn from Ghost’s processors.
The images of the females lingered, haunting him. His brain forgot. His databases never did. Ghost tried to sever the connection to his machine side. Both parts of him, wanting to remain whole, resisted and he wasn’t strong enough to overwhelm that blockade.
All he could do was slow the transfer of information.
He crouched beside his last target. Needing to do something, anything, he moved body parts from one spot to another.
That action didn’t stop the images running through his mind.
The last footage he’d recorded played. It featured the death of three females belonging to him, to his brethren. One of those females had been newly manufactured, couldn’t stand, couldn’t talk. All the females were defenseless. They’d surrendered to the Humanoid Alliance, laid down their primitive weapons.
The Humanoid Alliance, having no honor, had ordered the cyborgs to kill them. His brethren, not knowing who the females were to them, to their kind, had followed those commands.
Ghost had silently watched, unable to stop the carnage, his soul hollowed out by guilt. He couldn’t communicate to his brethren what they’d done, couldn’t give them that remorse, that grief. It was his to bear alone, silently.
The image faded.
The loop restarted. It always did, the torture never ceasing. The face of the little female filled his thoughts, her chubby cheeks, her brown curly hair, her big brown eyes.
The pain was endless and unbearable, projectiles piercing his brain, his heart, his soul. Ghost squeezed a handful of guts. Blood dripped on the tiled floor. He needed more beings to kill, more outlets for the agony. That might make the hurting tolerable.
More beings would arrive. The Humanoid Alliance would retrieve their warship.
When the males entered the vessel, he would seek vengeance. Every being he killed would be one less being able to harm the females.
That might ease his guilt, stop the pain.
Allow him to remain whole.