“If you were planning to hijack the flame, I’ll raise you a fleet destroyer.”
He shook his head slowly and inched closer. She couldn’t look away from the damaged side of his face. The missing eye. Just looking at the wound made her wince. She’d had him in her bed, let him touch her…and all the while this was underneath instead of the benign circuits and chips she’d assumed.
“I didn’t want the ship…didn’t even know you had it.”
A flush drew bright banners on his cheeks as he looked down, shifting his feet like a child caught with his hand in the kruss jar. Then he looked up, the look in his remaining eye direct.
“My name is Johnathon Howe, but I use Johnny Ram on stage. I’ve been trying to get close to you for months, but you always slipped away from the shows early and never contacted me backstage.”
He edged forward again and reached out for her hand. A tiny part of her brain had latched onto the fact he was a cyborg, running all the horror stories she’d heard over the news feeds over the years through her head. There were less now than when the Fleet had originally declared them all dangerous, but they didn’t make for a good night’s sleep. Homicidal, brutal…killers of children…rapists. The cyborgs had been accused of the most hideous crimes any sane person could think of and worse. But he hadn’t tried to rape her and load her, still alive, into an organ stripper.
She nodded silently as he took her hand and stroked a gentle thumb over her knuckles. Taking that as permission, he moved in closer. A finger hooked under her jaw brought her eyes up to meet his. She winced again, trying not to look too closely at the mechanical eye.
“Doesn’t that hurt? Do you even feel pain?”
She was taking this way too well. But her voice had a small waver in it and the controlled look in her dark eyes told him that the instant she sat down and thought about what had happened, she’d lose it.
Controlled hysteria. He didn’t blame her. A week ago the worst she’d had to contend with was shipping runs and, presumably, a shitty relationship with her ex-husband. Having that ex-husband hijack her ship and reveal he planned to send her alive to the organ farm would send anyone hysterical, especially a gentle soul like his Milly. The hard exterior she presented to the world was just that…a mask. Hard and solid, like a hull protecting the delicate contents within from the ravages of space.
“Yes, it hurts. I’m not totally machine, just parts of me. The rest is human.”
She winced again, reaching delicate fingers up to the damaged eye, but stopping short of actually touching.
“Was your eye…?”
He caught her hand and brought it to his lips, kissing the fingertips.
“Was my eye human? Originally, yes. It was a synth-organ to shield the implant. Looked like the real deal, but I don’t need it to see.”
“Oh.” Her lips pursed to form a perfect circle. “And the other one? Is that the same?”
He smiled, moving her hand down and trapping it against his chest, over his heart.
“No, that one’s real. One hundred percent human.” The eye was anyway, but the optic nerve wasn’t, replaced before he’d been woken with synth bundles to link directly to his onboard. But she didn’t need to know that.
“Sweetheart,” he broke in regretfully as she opened her mouth to speak again. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know later. But right now, we have a situation…” He nodded out onto the bridge and the man trapped in the helm chair. “And a crooked fleeter to deal with.”
Her face hardened as she followed the line of his gaze. Pulling away from him, she stalked out of the room, over the glass he’d shattered to get to her. Every line of her body was taut with fury.
“You f**king bastard.”
She reached the helm and hauled the heavy chair around, no mean feat in itself, and hovered over the captured man, her face twisted in anger. “Never could stand my noise, was it? And that gives you the right to take what’s mine, does it? Gives you the right to destroy my bot and have me raped and killed. Does it? Does it?” she snarled, her face mere inches from Jason’s.
He tried to lean back, escape the full force of her rage, but the backrest of the chair stopped him. His scared gaze flicked from Milly over her shoulder to Johnny and back again.
“Listen, baby…I was wrong. Seeing you again after you divorced me. Jealousy…”
Johnny felt sick as the weasel started in with the charm routine, his smile fixed in place as he looked back at Milly.
“Fucking stow it.” She snapped a hand out behind her. “Johnny, pistol. Now.”
“Baby, we can get past this. Start again…”
“Milly?” He couldn’t help the question as he stepped forward, holding the pistol out, grip first. She grabbed it, had the safety off and the muzzle pressed against Jason’s temple in a heartbeat, as smooth with the weapon as if she’d been born with it in her hand. “Milly…what are you doing, sweetheart?”
“What does it look like? I’m performing a little vermin control. I can’t stand lying rats, and this is the biggest I’ve ever seen. What do you reckon, one bolt or two?” She asked, one hand on the arm of the chair as she shoved the muzzle into Templeton’s groin.
“I think two, one for each brain. Although the second wouldn’t do much damage, would it, Jason? Not got much between the ears, have you? You’ll have even less when I’m done with you.”
Jason whimpered in response, his glib talk disappearing as Milly attempted to imprint the make and model of the pistol on the side of the barrel into the flesh of his balls.
“Milly…” Johnny moved forward, trying to get eye contact. Much as he wanted her to blow Jason’s brains out into a pretty little pattern all over the bridge, he couldn’t. “Milly, look at me. You don’t want to do this.”
She looked up at him, a feral light in her eyes as Jason blubbered like a child. Right at that moment she looked like she could take on the entire fleet and win. Lesson learnt, a woman scorned was a dangerous thing. A very dangerous thing. He’d just never appreciated how much and was suddenly glad it wasn’t his balls she had a pulse pistol to.
Unarmed, with his hands out to his side, he tried to instill calm and reason in his voice and expression. “Honestly, you don’t want to do this. Once you start killing, take someone else’s life…then there’s no going back. Something inside you changes forever. It’s not pretty…but it’s easy.”
“What do you mean, easy?”
She wavered, easing up with the hand that held the pistol and Jason slumped in the seat a little, no longer held up by the barrel between his balls. Johnny hoped the guy didn’t get too comfortable, that was still a fully charged pistol she had pointed at his gen**als.
“Killing is easy, justice isn’t.”
Keeping his voice calm, he moved forward. She tracked him every step of the way, Jason’s whimpers little more than background noise.
“You kill him and they’ll make him a hero. Put a spin on it. The brave Captain waylaid by pirates…or killed by his jealous ex-wife. You’ll be hunted down, shot in some back alley somewhere or your ship blown out of the sky to avoid the truth getting out.”
He reached the back of the chair, but didn’t try to take the pistol from her. “You can’t kill him, Milly—”
“Oh god, thank you.” Jason blubbered. “Listen to the man, he’s talking sense. You can’t kill me, just let me go and I’ll forget you were even he—”
“Forget?” Johnny’s voice cracked like a whip. “Oh, I didn’t say anything about forgetting, now did I? Oh no, we’re taking you back, sunshine. You’re going to pay for your crimes.”
Jason twisted, craning his neck and trying to look at Johnny behind him before Milly reclaimed his attention with a shove of her hand. Her dark eyes considered Johnny with interest.
“Go on.”
Johnny smiled, feeling the damaged part of his face pull. Hooking his fingers into the neckline of his shirt he tore it down the middle, then ripped a wide strip all the way around to tie over his face as an impromptu eyepatch. It cut his vision down by half but if the shit hit the fan, it would be the work of a moment to rip it off.
“Crimes?” Now that Milly didn’t seem in imminent danger of shooting him, Jason’s courage picked that moment to reappear. “I’ve got friends in high places. You think you’re going to get anything to stick? All I have to say was that I suspected you were carrying arms for terrorists. How long do you think you’ll manage to stay out of a cell?”
Johnny shook his head. Just how dumb was this guy?
“Oh I think we’ll manage to avoid that altogether. Remember the Payne extraction?”
Jason started, his face paling even further as Johnny rounded the chair to look at him.
“Payne extraction…No, I think you have the wrong g—fuckfuckfuck!” He whimpered as Milly powered up the pistol.
“I was married to you, you piece of shit. You think I don’t know when you’re lying? Now talk. Payne extraction.” She slid a sideways glance at Johnny. “What was the Payne extraction?”
Johnny folded his arms over his chest.
“It was my last mission, the day the Fleet decided to terminate the Zodiac project. We were sent in to recover Christian Payne. Templeton was sent in with us as observer.”
Milly started. “You mean Christian Payne, co-president Brooks-Payne?”
He nodded, his eyes still on Templeton. “That’s the one. He got himself in a bit of bother…his shuttle was hijacked on a surface to space hop. They sent us in to retrieve him.”
Templeton started to shake his head.
“No, that’s not possible. We killed you all. Every one of you!”
“Not all…” Johnny put his hand on Milly’s shoulder, easing her back. “Remember the medivac. Yeah…there were two of us there.”
“But, you were gone… You didn’t see anything.”
Johnny tapped his temple. “That’s the thing you gotta watch with cyborgs. What one of us knows, we all know. I heard Harris begging, I heard you laugh. I heard you kill that girl…and now you’ll pay.”
He ached to wrap his fingers around Templeton’s throat and send him to meet his maker. But he wouldn’t. No, they had to take him back, with the evidence stored in his long-term memory they had enough to get the human authorities to lock him up and throw away the key.
“He killed a child. You have evidence of that?” Milly asked sharply, pulling the pistol away and giving the man in the chair a look of pure disgust. “Just when I thought my opinion of you couldn’t any lower.”
“As if I care what a little cyborg-loving whore thinks,” he spat, emboldened by the fact the pistol wasn’t caressing his balls anymore. “Whatever you have, it’ll never get outside the admiralty. It’ll be squashed.”
Milly grinned as she motioned for Johnny to un-clip him. “Which is why I’m not sending it to the admiralty. No, I think the media stations will have far more fun with it. Can you upload a copy to the Starflame’s computer?”