“All right, all done. You can look now.” Claudia’s voice was happy—she must be satisfied with the job she’d done on him.

“Finally. Took long enough,” Drew grumbled but he wasn’t really upset. He turned his head and watched as the little doctor withdrew the drapes over his left arm to show him the result of her operation.

“Well?” She cocked an eyebrow at him. “What do you think?”

“What do I think?”

Drew surveyed the results of her surgery. From the elbow down he was no longer metal. Well, not completely metal, anyway. The cybernetic titanium alloy skeleton remained but there was flesh covering it now, making it look like he had a normal forearm and hand.

“I think it looks fucking amazing!” he told Claudia, grinning at her. “And you say it’s more touch-sensitive? I won’t have to worry so much about hurting you?”

“It should feel just like your right hand,” she promised him. “Here—let me turn your left arm sensors back on.” She reached behind his neck and fiddled with the CyBRG device, bringing his left arm, which she’d turned off during the surgery, back to life.

A familiar feeling of pins and needles prickled through his fingertips, as though his hand had gone to sleep and was just waking up. Familiar—but from his past life, before the CyBRG device. Drew had never thought to feel that sensation again. His left hand had been hard and cold from the moment he’d woken as Unit 77. It had never occurred to him that could be changed.

But Claudia had done it. His curvy little doctor was a fucking genius. She’d worked up a prosthetic for him over the past few weeks, growing the skin and muscle in the graft vats in her lab and coaxing it patiently to bond and adapt to a metal skeleton. She’d offered to do the entire arm but it would have taken weeks longer. Drew was content just to have a hand he could touch her with without fearing he might hurt her—a hand that could feel her softness and warmth when he stroked her skin.

“This is fucking amazing,” he whispered as he touched his fingertips one by one to his thumb and felt the delicate sensations. “It really feels like a real organic hand!”

“Glad you like it. Here, catch.”

Claudia tossed something small and white to him and he caught it reflexively in the new left hand before looking down at it, nestled in his palm.

“An egg?”

“An unbroken egg,” she emphasized. “And I’m a lot tougher than a fragile little egg, soldier. If you can handle that, you can handle me.”

Drew felt something swell in his heart and though he wasn’t usually an emotional guy, for a minute he had to swallow a lump in his throat. She must know how much this meant to him—how it made him feel like less of a monster and more of a man. He’d been learning to embrace the cyborg part of himself. All of the rogues in his company were. But it helped to know he wouldn’t hurt the woman he loved by accident. Helped a hell of a lot.

“Baby,” he murmured roughly. Putting down the egg, he drew her to him, cupping her cheek in his new left hand and marveling at the warmth and softness of her skin. He wanted to touch her everywhere with this new hand of his—wanted to feel her full breasts filling his palms and trace the curves of her hips…

But just as he was pulling her in for a passionate kiss, the sound of someone clearing their throat stopped him.

“Captain?” Whoever it was sounded slightly uncomfortable, doubtless because they’d caught him and Claudia in the middle of an embrace.

“Yeah, what is it?” Drew growled, irritated at the interruption.

“Sorry but there’s a call on the Vid I think you’re going to want to take.”

It was Rich, looking a hell of a lot better than he had. He’d finally healed completely and now he walked with a confident stride, head held high, broad shoulders thrown back, pale blue eyes glinting in the light of the med shack.

“Call from whom? Somebody looking to buy,” Drew demanded. They hadn’t gotten any outside calls since they’d moved back and taken over the base. A base where now he and his company of rogues and Claudia were the only occupants.

Drew wondered if one of Pike’s buyers from the black market was calling. If so, they were going to be sorely disappointed. The cybernetic soldiers who had been programmed for loyalty to Pike—the soulless ones who had truly been brain dead when the CyBRG device was implanted in them—had been permanently deactivated and laid to rest on Drew’s orders.

He wasn’t about to sell them as Pike had wanted to. They were nothing but cybernetically reanimated corpses. The very thought was obscene. So anyone who had been promised a big order of cyber soldiers was going to be upset.

But Rich’s next words dispelled one worry—and raised another.

“It’s not one of Pike’s buyers,” he said, his blue eyes troubled. “It’s Admiral Brock Pierce on the line—the head honcho himself.”

“Pierce is top brass of the Space Corps,” Claudia said, frowning. “What does he want with us? Is he looking for Pike?”

Rich shook his head and ran a hand through his shaggy, dark brown hair.

“No, he already knew Pike was gone. He wants to speak directly to Drew.”

“Wants to speak to me?” Drew frowned. “What the hell does he want? To court-martial me for killing Pike and taking over? He’ll have a hell of a time with that since he’s all the way back on Mars base and we’re out here in the fringe colonies.”

“I don’t think it’s any kind of a disciplinary action.” Rich had a troubled look on his face as he spoke. “He said…he said he needs our help, Drew.”

“Our help?” Drew shook his head. It was the last thing he would have expected. “What the fuck? What does he want our help with?”

“It’s his daughter.” Rich looked more troubled than ever. “He says she’s been kidnapped by the Tr’Low Breeding Cult and he needs us to get her back.”