***

A SINGLE AMBER TRICKLE of beer caught his eye.

Gunner pumped the wort through the calandria that marked the end of the boil. He sat back as it flushed into his jacked-up whirlpool tank to separate out. Some of it dripped onto the floor from where a minor leak had formed. The beer dribbled until it fell from the tank to splash onto the ground, where it was quickly caught up in his ship’s ventilation.

He couldn’t see behind the copper piping—which was foraged from other parts of his ship—while the centripetal force pushed the debris into the bottom middle of the tank. And as such, the fragrant aroma of hops filled his bathroom.

He grabbed a nearby cloth and wiped his hands but didn’t try too hard for cleanliness. His eyes drifted from the machinery to his nails, cracked and tainted. His hands would never be clean again. Not even a chemical cloth, designed for sanitization, could scrub the grease, sweat, and blood that had long ago fouled his cybernetic skin. Not even if he released the beast inside him, letting the metal shift and having his cybernetic cells rebuild him from the inside out.

He was dirty.

And doomed to remain so.

“Take it.” Gunner thrust the cloth at Browning, his partner in beer brewing, and number three in his life. She came after his AI, his second due to unwavering loyalty based on cracked-up codes.

“Yes, sir.”

His steps echoed through the small lavatory-turned-brewery as he checked the process over. The silence that followed was a low hum to his ears. Even Browning was a quiet little lamb beside him, holding his garbage as if she was created for it.

Which, in a manner of speaking, she was.

He couldn’t remember the last time he was in the direct presence of a living, breathing human. The toys he surrounded himself with were all he knew now, and as he calculated how long it would take for his beer to finish brewing, he also knew the inevitable quickly approached.

The next drop-off point with Stryker.

Gunner turned full-circle, grounding himself in his enclosed territory, and taking it all in.

The heat in the room was rising, albeit slowly, which would spoil the fermentation.

He swiveled on his heel and headed for the control panel, pressing his hand up against the greased-streaked glass.

Two of a kind. We’re both covered in grease.

He programmed the temperature to lower once the whirlpool was done, setting himself a countdown to remind him to return. The time ran down by seconds. It felt like an internal pull, the kind of pull that kept your eyes checking the clock on the other side of the room while you’re trying to fall asleep.

Gunner ran his fingers through his hair, pushing it back, and pulling it tightly before letting it go.

Just then, the ghost of something warm, teasing, with soft skin, edged with a porcelain nail ran from the middle of his neck to slide in subtle waves down his spine, ending with a light tap on his lower back at the waistband of his jeans. When it left him, he rolled his shoulders and accepted the calculated touch for what it was.

Fake.

Browning stepped away from him like a shadow at dawn, there one moment, soft and shaded, and gone the next, bleached out by the sun’s ever-watching spotlight.

But the countdown and the swirl of the whirlpool continued on in reality.

Browning was fake—a specifically designed android—and he hated and loved it every time her programming pretended not to be. Gunner grabbed hold of her long brown hair and tugged lightly, eliciting another response out of her: a coy smile just for him. He dropped his hand and shook the feel of her off.

“Need something more from me?” she asked ever-so-sweetly. He didn’t answer.

Maybe it’s time. His lips fell into a frown. Time for fucking what? Gunner glanced away from her, uneasy in the way his contraptions always made him feel. He moved to the whirlpool to watch the deep amber liquid swirl.

Time for what? The swell of rushing waves filled his ears. It was the same question that plagued him day in and day out, ever since he accepted his exile. What’s there to do?

‘There’s an abnormal structure in our path.’

His ship’s AI, APOLLO, interrupted his thoughts. With his head still deep within his ship’s systems, he seeded through the data from the sensors, moving to re-press his hand to the control panel.

‘What kind of structure?’ he asked.

‘According to the most recent scans, another ship.’

Gunner downloaded the scans and checked them over. A ship. Or a large chunk of debris left behind by another larger ship, or both.

‘Keep scanning. Move closer. Use the active sensors if you have to, we aren’t sneaking around,’ he ordered.

He felt the change before the command was uploaded and they went off-course altogether, heading toward an abrupt anomaly instead of the drop-off point and Stryker. Browning moved to stand behind him, anticipating his needs, half-controlled by APOLLO herself, but made no move to close the distance or to take over the brewing.

‘Approaching obstruction in five...’

Four.’

Three.’

Two. Scanning again.’

He flexed his bicep and tapped his finger on the panel, waiting. There was no one in the universe who hated waiting more than he did. ‘Check for power,’ Gunner added.

Several moments went by before the AI responded. ‘Ship confirmed. Power detected inside, including minor electrical signals. No distress call or any correspondence outward. One human on board.’

He lifted his hand away from the wall and snagged the cloth from Browning, wiping it clean again, and dropped it on the floor this time when he was done. He pulled a joint out of his pocket and lit up, taking a deep drag, waiting.

His timer ticked along in the back of his mind, evaporating against the heat of his concentration. His eyes roved over the haphazard machines strewn about once again and he filled his nose with the scents they created. Burning, musky, earthy scents.

Gunner knew everything about this room, everything about his ship. There wasn’t a line of code out of place, a smell he couldn’t detect, or an android or sexbot he hadn’t reconfigured to his exact specifications. Dommik had his standard model androids, the Bins, and Stryker had alcoholic Matt. He, on the other hand, had his beautiful robotic crew. What better than to spend countless days looking at something beautiful?

“Follow me,” he ordered over his shoulder to Browning as he left the room, leaving for the bridge.

The dark grey tones and the streak of low LED lights that lined the floor glinted as he moved past a dozen shut doors and portholes that looked out into space. He flicked his gaze to the left where he could see the hulk that APOLLO was currently scanning.

Fucking salvagers.

The doors to the bridge slid open silently as he neared. Colt and Flashbang, two more bots just like Browning, were already in attendance, manning the controls in his absence. They moved to the edges of the cockpit when he neared, Browning joined them at the sides.

“Send them a communication, try and reach whatever lifeform is in it,” Gunner barked out. APOLLO responded to the order instantly.

They waited for a response that didn’t come.

Gunner sourced out stashed clothes and tossed on a simple undershirt, foregoing his EPED uniform to don his camo cargo fatigues and jacket. The pockets were lined with more supplies than on his person.

When he sat down on his self-styled throne—a used-up, beaten captain’s seat—there was still no answer from the smaller, broken vessel.

He ordered APOLLO to send another message. Updated scans alerted him to movement and activity and again confirmed that there was only one lifeform on the downed salvage ship. Whoever was on the broken-down heap was well enough to move. Hopefully, they were well enough to talk as well.

Gunner knew his curiosity was far from helpful. He was just bored. But here he was regardless, waiting, anticipating something to happen, and feeling a twinge of annoyance that he gave any of his precious time to anyone based on curiosity alone.

His eyes flicked to the several unanswered missives he’d sent to Stryker. They had begun to pile up and although he loved a good pile, he wondered why his co-worker wasn’t responding.

One more cycle... One more wormhole... Several more jumps... Then he would have been at the meet-up point on the outer edges of Earth’s solar system—as close as he was allowed to go.

He was banned from commercial spaceways and all known paths of travel between humanity and the Trentian aliens.

Which brought him back to the broken hulk outside his ship and the mystery of its presence.

Boredom. Grade-A fucking boredom.

He trailed his finger over his lower lip as an odd surge of anticipation hit him.

“Call the team,” he announced.

Colt and Flashbang stepped forward. Gunner’s eyes trailed after their lithe bodies through the reflected glass as they did what they were told. He wasn’t a complete perv—his sexbots-turned-crew were clothed in uniforms, and they even carried weapons he had trained them with. If something were to happen, they could fight by his side and defend themselves.

No one touched what was his. No one.

Each of his girls had a learned personality, albeit coded, and the conversations he sometimes stumbled upon them having broke up his monotony.

Just then, a response came back and he sat forward. Who would he be dealing with?

The bridge doors zipped open, ushering in the sounds of a dozen reconfigured androids taking up position.

Colt, Flashbang, Winchester, Remington, Glock, Super Soaker, Gatling, Turret, Smith, Wesson, Weatherby, Ammo, and his personal favorite, Browning, all lined up, flanking his sides. His beautiful, perfect, plastic sexbots. His fake kingdom all in one room. A beacon of the technology that made up his quiet empire.

His gunner girls.

They would as easily kill you as fuck you. His lips crept up into a smile, remembering the chaos that he created when he reprogrammed them to kill him. Thirteen monsters of his own making going after their own master’s blood. At the time he wanted to give them a chance, to see if they could actually harm him, allowing them to learn and calibrate throughout the exhilarating process.

But in the end, they couldn’t even touch him.

APOLLO powered up a visual and fed it straight to his mind before projecting it onto the hologram screen across the bridge.

A young man appeared, standing but hunched over a control panel of his own. Gunner leaned forward and the man leaned back. Human. Not half-breed, not alien... human.

“Hello? Can you hear me? Hello?” the man called out.

“I can hear you.” Gunner rested his elbows on his knees. The boy couldn’t be older than his early twenties. The visual was clear but not without some grain, and he didn’t need to seed into the currents to know that power fluctuations on the boy’s end were causing the disturbance between them.

“Some good news at last,” the boy laughed and shifted his eyes across his visual. Gunner knew what he was seeing, knew what the sight of his favorites behind him looked like, but kept his amusement to himself. “Been out here for months now, and nobody has come by.”

“What’s your name?” Gunner asked.

APOLLO responded before the boy did, ‘Encrypted documents on the ship suggest we’re speaking to a Nickel Smith, one in a crew of twelve on a ship named Blessed.’

‘Blessed?’

‘Blessed’s history suggests its origins come from the Gliese new wave star carriers, made from the parts of war battlecruisers that were beyond repair. It is one in a three ship series for the missionaries of the moon, followed by Touched, and preceded by Reborn.’

“Name’s Nickel, yours?” the boy said.

Gunner groaned. Religion.

Even in deep space, he couldn’t get away from it. Browning snickered at his side and it was enough to bring a smile to his lips. She’s my favorite.

“Gunner. So, Nickel,” he sat back, “what happened?”

Nickel noticeably looked away from the uniformed beauty of his gunner girls. Entertainment could still be had, while Gunner waited for that snake-faced Stryker to get back to him and answer his latest message.

“Will you help me if I tell you?”

“Depends on my mood,” he said, shrugging.

“I can help him,” Flashbang suggested, cutting in. The other bots tittered and agreed until he held up his hand, silencing them. Nickel’s eyes widened, and Gunner zoomed his screen in on them, making his girls laugh anew.

“I’m the one with all the cards, Nickel. Why ask inane questions?” Get back to business.

“Because if I’m going to waste my time telling you when you’re planning on killing me anyway, I would just like to speed it up. I’ve come to terms already,” the boy admonished.

“Terms with what?”

“That my death is inevitable. That my life, currently, is an unending punishment.”

Gunner cackled. “With an attitude like that, it sure fucking is.”

“The goddesses of the holy moons have turned their back on me and the crew,” the boy’s voice quivered then hardened. “And I have given up hope that they would help.”

“Maybe I’m the help they’re giving.” Gunner hardly tempered his sarcasm.

He didn’t believe in fate or karma, or any other mystical, spiritually-washed up element out there. Religions spread like disease and from the most idiotic sources possible: a tree growing to adulthood overnight; a million falling stars landing over a field of crop; the sudden, inexplicable death of a tyrant; an abrupt end to a war that raged terror for a hundred years.

Fucking Lysander.

He knew a fair bit about the various spiritual sects that had found footing throughout the new wave of colonies on Gliese, Kepler, and Elyria. The universe was a big place after all, and unusual, unexplainable wonders happened every day.

Unless you were a Cyborg. Nothing held wonder to a Cyborg. His god was science, and his belief ran through his veins like the nanocells that coursed through him. There was always an explanation. Even if the explanation was pure bad fucking luck.

It was his damn job, after all, getting the materials needed to the EPED to figure out those explanations.

Gunner smirked. The mood killer of all mood killers... Let me fuck with your mind.

APOLLO’s final scans flooded his head and all the information that he needed to know about Nickel’s dying ship.

“Nickel, even if you are a degenerate, bloodsucking, brainwashed religious zombie,” the glare of his eyes going red spilled across the glass screen, “it appears that your reactor is dying, and what power you do have left stored isn’t enough to get you anywhere. I’d give it, ehh, eight maybe nine cycles before life-support shuts down. You’ll die from depressurization over a span of several excruciating hours. But that all depends on how much food you have left, and considering the way you look, your supply is low.”

“Considering.” Nickel shifted on his feet. “Unfortunately, this brainwashed zombie has nothing to offer you in return for your help.”

“Unfortunately not,” he agreed. Over his dead body would he employ a human like Nickel. “Make me an offer with what you do have.”

“My soul?”

“Nah, ain’t a soul collector. What else?”

“The chance to corrupt me?”

“Are you so desperate to live that you’d give up your beliefs so easily?”

“A chance. Not a conversion,” Nickel bleated back. “Men like you—I can see it in your mechanical human eyes—need a distraction.”

Gunner pondered. “Cute. But you’re way below my pay-grade and corrupting young boys isn’t my thing, not that you would ever be able to distract me long enough to care.”

His eyes drifted to the unanswered missives to Stryker. Maybe the boy’s onto something. His jaw ticked.

“Ah.” Nickel canted his head. “Too bad I don’t have a pussy to trade with? Is that it? Or is it money you want?”

“Money is a means to an end and even pussy isn’t worth the amount of siphon your ship will need to get out of here. And I have enough of both already.” He indicated his girls and his gleaming silver-streaked bridge walls. “My guns don’t get a chance to say no. It’s the beauty of pulling the trigger.”

“What about a good conversation?”

“Deal.” Gunner snorted, having already decided to help the kid out a little. Not many looked into his eyes and didn’t turn away.

“Really?” Nickel guffawed before recovering to spear him with a suspicious glare.

‘Dock our ships,’ he ordered APOLLO. ‘Scan the perimeter.’

‘Docking now. The perimeter is clear aside from Blessed and us. Two moons are in range—’

‘That’s all.’

Gunner waved at his bots and they all returned to their positions.

Colt, Flashbang, and Browning remained with him on the bridge. He fingered the AutoMag under his jacket lapel, his back to the screen and the boy. When his ship trembled, he knew the docking was complete and that he and Nickel were now connected.

“Nickel, step away from the Blessed’s control panels,” he barked with his eyes still on his girls.

“What? Why?”

‘Take Blessed over.’ He gave APOLLO the order without waiting.

His AI flushed from his own ship and flooded into the dying one, bringing life with it. Gunner dipped into the channels after, wincing, hating the weak connections and flickering currents. He fell out and back into his body quickly.

But not before he locked Nickel out, rewriting the current programs and security access. Gunner couldn’t hold back an unpleasant groan, his digital-self shuddering from penetrating half-dead tech.

“What are you doing? It’s not responding to me anymore?” Nickel’s frustration poked at the edge of his consciousness.

“Are you okay, sir?” Browning’s voice gripped him and pulled him the rest of the way out of his uneasy disgust. Gunner returned to the screen without answering her, his eyes again falling on the unanswered messages to Stryker.

Piece of cybernetic snake shit.

“I locked you out,” he said. “Get ready for boarding. I’m on my way.”

A fucking conversation for an energy sap.

Gunner shut the communication down without waiting for a response. The reflected glare of his eyes receded as the hologram screen shot back into the bridge paneling. He moved to Browning and drifted his fingers across her cold, fabricated cheek. The contact did nothing for him.

“I need to you take care of the beer, dolly.”

“Need me to take care of anything else?” A smile graced her lips as her eyelids dropped. He drew a soft lock of her long brown hair away from her neck and shoulder and pushed it back, leaning into the crook of her neck to breathe in her fabricated scent of arousal and the very real smell of hops.

“Always. Everything,” Gunner whispered quietly against her skin. A series of goosebumps raised in response but he didn’t touch her further. He drew back and gave Browning a once over. “I’ll be back soon but be a good girl and make sure the crew behaves. I don’t want to come back to what you did last time.”

“You liked what I did last time.”

“Sure.” Gunner turned away and checked his jacket pockets. “But I like my orders being followed more.” He grabbed Browning’s wrist and pushed her skin back, revealing control overrides and suppressed the fake free-will he usually allowed her, before he dropped her arm. Her head snapped upright and her eyelids raised. The gooseflesh that had flushed her skin settled back down into her.

He lifted her other hand, kissed the back of it, and left.

***

“NICKEL.”

“Gunner?” the boy greeted back, glancing beyond him to see if he brought any of his girls.

Joke’s on him. I need all thirteen.

“Goddesses, your eyes! Are you... are you actually blind?”

“Am I?” His eyes were an oddity, a malfunction from times past. There was no color to his irises, just a milky grey like that of a fully blind human. The real color never showed unless he focused on something or was feeling particularly hyped.

Gunner stepped around the kid and made his way to the ship’s mainframe, the blueprints in his head and his AI leading the way. The disarray and interior abuse was on par with some of the ancient vessels. He took in the dented metal—rust coated the edges—and dirt and skid marks across the floors. His nose twitched, filling with must, body odor, and what he could swear was bodily decay. Old bodily decay.

“You get rid of the corpses?” he asked as he continued through the ship.

“What? Uh, what? Yes. How did you know? I sent them out to space.”

“I can still smell them.”

“How? The last one...died over two weeks ago.” There was a muffled hint of remorse in Nickel’s voice that spoke volumes. It surprised Gunner that of everyone who must’ve been on Nickel’s crew, that he was the one to survive.

“I have a great sense of smell,” he muttered before the entryway to the reactor.

Nickel sidled up to him. “That really sucks. I can’t stand the smell right now, and I can’t even smell the decay anymore. You enhanced with cybernetics? Your eyes had a red glow earlier.”

Gunner forced through the reactor’s separate security, and APOLLO suppressed the breach alarm without question. “You could say that.”

“I’d like to get some work done myself...”

They walked into the machine room together, his liner gun tapping his chest with each step. The kid doesn’t see a Cyborg. Not many did when it came to him, because his frame wasn’t as bulked up as some of his brethren; instead, he had a tall, wiry internal structure. The beast didn’t need extra mass to shift into shape. The jackal preferred speed over strength.

And my jacket hides the rest. Gunner pulled out what he needed from his lining and started on the reactor. There was coding to be done before his ship would be able to connect directly to it, coding that was easier done in person than it was in cyberspace. He peeled back the barricaded, triple-layered mainframe until it exposed the computer housed within.

“What kind of work?” Gunner asked.

“A big dick, for one,” Nickel laughed. “The kind that never quits unless forced and does all the work for you. But no, I kid, if I could get anything done, it’d be a metabolism regulator. After these past few months, forcing my body to shut down would’ve been great. You were right about the food. I’m down to quarter rations now.” As he said it, his stomach growled low and hollow. Gunner pulled out a protein bar from one of his many pockets and handed it to him.

“Thanks man...” Nickel took it without question.

“Hmm.”

Gunner turned away and cracked the reactor open like an egg, almost surprised with how easy it was. Any hacker with half a brain could’ve done what he did. The Blessed was a disgrace to all Earthian cybersecurity.

The security on his own ship had started out the best that money could buy and was then enhanced by a team of his more paranoid Cyborg brethren. He learned from them and now maintained it with APOLLO. Unlike the other Cyborgs in the EPED, he needed the best security. He was given jobs that dealt with monsters on an entirely different level. Human monsters.

It was a game of Russian roulette with his employers. It was easy for the EPED to put him on missions that were more likely to cause his death than not. He was expendable and always would be. But he was also an asset because he never. Fucking. Died.

And he never questioned.

Browning once told him that his death would as likely cause a celebration as it would a wake. That whether he lived or died, the universe would be interrupted for a heartbeat, but it would then go on without him. His death would never be more than a nuisance. But then he stuck his cock in her mouth, she got him off, and he watched in resentment as she traipsed to the sink in his brew room, spit out his seed, and clean out her mouth so thoroughly that it had pissed him off. A sex-bot had angered him. Browning had been demoted to maintenance for a year after that stunt and he had to make do with the others.

In the end, she won, and his favor returned with his mirth.

The connection to their ships fused and he left his AI to take care of the siphoning process. Gunner lifted away.

“You’ll have enough power to get to the nearest port in several hours,” he said.

Nickel pocketed the protein wrapper and eyed the reactor’s computer. “I appreciate it. So about that conversation? You get lonely out here in space all alone?”

Gunner slammed one the barricades back in place. “What makes you think I’m alone?”

“Based on what I saw, you are. Androids are nothing but a shield. The goddesses give them no favor.”

He turned to the boy. “It’s true, a good guess, I don’t like to share. Humans need others in their lives, robots don’t.” It wasn’t the real reason there were no humans on his ship, but the boy didn’t need to know that.

Nickel laughed and sat on a nearby pipe. “A shame that. I’d corrupt myself all over them if you know what I mean.”

Gunner narrowed his eyes. Nickel’s laughter wilted.

“If you even breathed on my ship, you’d be as good as dead. When I said I don’t like to share, I meant it. I won’t tolerate the idea either.”

‘Approaching vessel entering perimeter.’ Gunner snapped out of his anger and pulled out his gun.

“Shit! I’m sorry, I was making a joke!” Nickel jerked back.

‘Power up the guns, hail them, send me diagnostics,’ he flooded his AI with commands.

‘Guns stalled while boarded. Hail ignored. Uploading current scans now.’

Gunner dropped the connection between their ships without turning back, and stormed out and into the hallways of the Blessed. Nickel was on his heels with a barrage of questions.

The upload couldn’t come fast enough.

‘Four ships, heavily armed and targeted on us. More are entering our airspace, sir. They have yet to accept our hail. Should we undock?’

‘Yes!’ he yelled in his head, his feet picking up, his body pushing forward into a sprint. The dock was already disengaging when he turned the corner, the doors shutting.

“Gunner! What’s wrong!?” Nickel screamed somewhere far behind him. Gunner was several yards from the exit.

I’m going to make it. He was bored, but not that bored.

But he felt the missile before it hit his ship. He felt the power and the impact as it struck the side of the docking bay, blasting his chances of ever making it back aboard his ship alive into oblivion. The metal crushed and groaned, caving inward then outward, knocking him off his feet and slamming him into the rusted, ancient, used-up side paneling of the Blessed.

A roaring filled his ears, his head, and consumed his mainframe with a surge. It was enough to make him stand, if only for a moment, before he short-circuited on the spot. His face hit the ground and his eyes flashed once more before that faded too. He reached out, fingers twitching, grasping for something just out of reach.

‘Browning,’ his whispered as rage built inside him.

‘What can I do for you?’ her message flitted behind his eyes.

‘Break. Break all the guns...’

Their dying programming was the last thing he sensed before he rebooted, and the smell of gasoline replaced the hops.