Eric 754 (20 page)

He looked at Meara who was rapidly reading the research notes he’d just transferred to his portable com. “And just what do you think you are doing? That information about Captain Pennington is confidential.”

Meara glanced up at Nero as he took the com from her hands. “I was only passing the time while ya argued with Aja. I have to say though, ya sound very formal in yar notes. All you write is
subject known as Evelyn 489
. Can’t ya just call her Lucy and be done with it?”

Nero put the com on his lap when he returned to his console. “Please leave. I have no time to waste on your mischief.”

Aja released a frustrated breath. “Meara, take a short walk down the hall, will you? I need to talk to our good Dr. Cyberstein alone.”

Meara snorted. “Oh no, Aja… I’m thinking that would not be a good idea at all.”

Aja walked to her friend and held her gaze. “May Shiva end my life this day if I hurt so much as a single hair on his head.”

Nero watched as Meara’s gaze swung his way. He got a bit nervous when she grinned at him.

“Well, she sounds sincere at least. Are ya willing to risk being alone with her, Nero?”

Nero narrowed his gaze on both women. “As I have said several times now, I am not afraid of Aja. But I have no time to chat this evening. I am going to have to take a booster to make any progress on my investigations before tomorrow.”

Meara snorted again. “Well, ya should be afraid of her—at least a little—but I’m tired of refereeing the two of ya. It’s a tiresome job.” She rose from her chair and left the room.

“Okay, Aja. You have wrangled five minutes of my time. Have a seat and tell me what is important enough that I should interrupt my work on your captain’s problems to hear it.”

Chaffing at his commands, and his attitude, Aja finally sat in the chair closest to him.

“I can see I’ve made you cranky again. I suppose I should apologize for my Dr. Cyberstein reference. Meara tells me I’m working through some anger issues that have nothing to do with you. Since she’s usually a better judge of such things than I am, perhaps you can accept her explanation as my excuse. She also says, if I understand her intellectual gibberish correctly, that you aren’t making much headway because of the extensive damage done to Lucy’s original cybernetics.”

“I am making all the progress I can given the small amount of still functional cybernetics Kyra managed to extract from Captain Pennington,” Nero declared, dropping his defensiveness to frown at his statements.

The truth was he wasn’t gaining much insight into what the damaged chips did, or to her primary military programming. Given Captain Pennington’s volatile reactions to date, and the weapon she carried, any mistakes he made could be deadly for everyone. The last time he’d been this nervous was when they removed King’s internal weapon and had to disconnect it from his processor.

“Many of her chips are too damaged to be read, even by the most sophisticated of code-reading devices. Without knowing what was once on those chips, all I can do is surmise answers based on other chips that are less damaged. Since this involves Captain Pennington’s continued existence, such guessing is not good enough.”

Aja nodded—crossed her arms—and swallowed hard. “Yes. I understand what you’re saying is true. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I can save you a lot of time. You can get all the research you need from me.”

Nero felt his attitude toward her soften at her offer. Aja was wrong, but well-meaning for once. “I appreciate your suggestion. However, I examined your chips carefully during your restoration. The coding on them is vastly different from Captain Pennington’s.”

Aja nodded. “Indeed the coding is vastly different and it took me nearly a whole year to make sure that was the case. However, I kept a copy of the version we had when we escaped. It should be far closer to hers.”

“Are you telling me you actually re-programmed yourself?” Nero demanded, searching Aja’s gaze for the truth. “I don’t know how to respond. That is a statement I have never heard from another cyborg.”

“Well, it’s not like I had aspirations of becoming a freaking code monkey. Being an amateur, I greatly feared shutting us down accidentally, so I restricted my changes to a rewrite of end tasks. I made it so our New World Companion code directions would prompt us do a silly thing instead of a humiliating thing when activated. Not as elegant as your full out restoration and processor swap, but what I did at least freed us from the worst of our original torments. My intention was to steal Lucy and apply the same strategy to her. In the beginning, all three of us were practically mirrors of each other code wise.”

Nero sat straighter in his chair. He was literally at a loss for words. Many cyborgs had breakthrough moments where their organic brains learned how to disrupt their cybernetic programming. But this was the first time he’d ever heard of a cyborg who decided to rewrite the code that controlled her.

Aja shrugged. “I’m self-taught, certainly nothing of a coder on the level of a cyber scientist. I only rewrote what I was fairly sure I understood. Of course I had to hire a black market version of you to actually load the code onto my logic chip for me. If you want all the gory details, Meara did some favors for him and afterwards he was very accommodating. When he got done loading my fixes, and we saw it had worked well enough, I talked him into loading the fixes I made for Meara’s chip as well. Sometimes I wonder how much of her silliness is my own damn fault.”

“Do you think the black market cyber scientist you used might have made a copy of your code?” He was thinking that might explain how Creator Omega got his hands on it.

“No. We never left the man alone for a second and watched him do all the work. And don’t ask what happened to him after he fixed us unless you can stand to hear it. We obviously couldn’t leave a trail of what we’d done to ourselves.”

Nero tilted his head, looking at Aja with a newly found respect. “I see. Well, let’s move on from that topic. What exactly did you change in your code to get the end tasks to be different? I would very much appreciate knowing in case I could apply the strategy to some of our more challenging restorations.”

Aja looked Nero in the eyes, unashamed of her efforts. What did she care if the man secretly thought she was just another hack? But out came an explanation along with his name—both of which surprised her.

“That better not be sarcasm at my expense, Nero Bastion. Yes—what I did was implement a bunch of guesses. I wasn’t clever enough to get rid of the shutdown code as you well know. My main focus was to thwart the non-ending signals driving us to madness. Anything was better than wearing ear plugs at night to try and shut out the constant brain-to-brain pinging from our captain. It was also better than using the drugs we had to use in the beginning to even get ourselves unconscious enough to rest. For that whole first year we were running, Meara and I took turns sleeping just to make sure no one came for us.”

Nero shook his head. He was emotionally torn between feeling admiration for all they’d done and anger at what Aja and Meara had endured. “I have nothing but the utmost respect for all your efforts. So please tell me your story—how did you work out your code solutions? Did you clone your chips and test the code before you uploaded changes?”

Slightly mollified by his pleading, Aja shrugged and decided to answer. “Test? Are you kidding? The information contained in the original code served more like a reference library to check against my guesses. I was a whiz bang at theory, but altering the actual code was like taking a huge leap of faith. I spent more time praying than I did constructing the changes. That is why I had my changes done first.”

Nero nodded, stared, and admired the woman who’d been brave enough to take such a chance. “It was brave of you to attempt such changes without safeguards.”

“Safeguards? They are a luxury for those operating on the sly. Not that I care what you think of me going ahead without all the careful tests I’m sure you do with your work.”

Aja held up her middle finger, smirking when Nero’s eyes instantly lit with offense. With his angry gaze focused on her hand, she reached over with her other one and removed the fingernail from the saluting appendage, sliding it out of its perfectly designed slot. She held the cleverly hidden storage device out for him to take and smiled as he stared at it open-mouthed.

“Don’t just gawk at it, take the damn thing. If you use what’s on it against me in any way, I swear by all my gods and goddesses that it will be your death sentence. The Irish tormentor I sometimes call a friend has creepy intuition and spent a good while talking me into using my so-called stealth storage to keep copies of our original coding. Now I see the situation with Captain Pennington was why. Shiva be praised Meara got her way with me. You’ll find a replica of both our codes on it.”

Nero cleared his throat, reached out for the fingernail enhancement, stunned that he had totally missed seeing it during her restoration. It had him wondering what he might had missed seeing on his other restoration subjects. As he turned the clever construction over and over between his fingers, he noticed a universal connector port on the bottom. He knew there was a matching dock for it on Aja’s hand.

Though anxious now to see what the device contained, he couldn’t risk inserting it into Norton’s com, not even for a brief look. He’d have to do it at home later. The New World Companion code could not be made public until he knew for certain it could be undone.

“I need to look at this on a more secure com device than I have available for my use at the moment. Can I keep your enhancement for a day?”

Aja shrugged. “Sure, but I’d like it back eventually. Otherwise, my finger will look a bit odd when I flip someone off, don’t you think?”

Hoping to restore her power over the man, Aja held up her middle finger again to show Nero the now empty slot. She was surprised when he laughed and took her hand in one of his. Nero held the fingernail next to her finger, studying it with a scientific wonderment that usually angered her. Two days liberated and she was already losing her edge.

“The enhancement was so well crafted, I never saw it on your person. I suppose that was the point. Are any of the other fingernails storage devices?”

Aja shook her head. “No. Only the one. The military probably thought it was more stealthy that way. They picked the middle finger because it had the largest nail probably. I assigned a more nefarious meaning to their choice.”

He raised his gaze to hers, rubbing a thumb over her knuckles as he pocketed her fingernail. “Thank you for your willingness to help me. I will make a copy of what you have saved and return your cybernetic enhancement to you tomorrow.”

She grew more nervous when Nero did not immediately release her hand. She had given him what she’d come to give him. Why did he not simply let go?

“Yes of course you will return it, or I will come to you and take it back by force.”

Aja felt a feminine flutter in her belly when Nero smiled widely at her threat. His teeth were very white when contrasted with his warm chocolate skin. If not for the chiseled Roman jaw, he might have passed for any number of potential life partners her father had tried to arrange for her. She had run off to the military expressly to avoid refined, stuffy men like Nero Bastion.

His immaculate masculine beauty was nothing but a distraction, one obviously with the power to freeze her in her seat. Her awareness of his physicality had to be the reason she didn’t sling the smiling male away from her, especially when he lifted her cybernetic hand to his lips for an old fashioned knuckle kiss.

“Thank you for trusting me, Aja Kapur. I know how difficult that must be after all you have gone through. I promise I will use your information to help restore your captain. Your sharing has saved me countless hours of frustrating guesses which could have gone horribly wrong.”

Robbed of all reactions except a sudden fierce desire to press her mouth to his just to see if he tasted as good as he looked, Aja nodded, rose, and walked blindly out of the room.

Chapter 15

Eric grabbed the hand covering his mouth and squeezed it hard as he pulled it away. A shushing in his ear had him struggling to focus in the dark instead of yelling at the person. When his eyes cooperated, he saw Lucy crouched down by the sofa beside him. She was staring at the bars blocking the stairs instead of at him.

He leaned over and down to her to whisper into her ear. “What’s going on?”

Lucy didn’t turn. “I am waking you while I keep watch.”

Eric grinned at her literal answer. “Let me try again. What happened to the lights?”

When they turned toward each other in the dark, their lips were practically touching. His stomach tightened in awareness, but he didn’t act because he couldn’t tell if Lucy felt the pull. Either way, she seemed able to ignore their proximity a lot better than he did.

“The emergency lights are on because someone has cut all power to our residence. The security bars are no longer electrified. Of the two building guards, I can no longer hear the heartbeat of the human one. He is either dead or his body has been removed outside my enhanced hearing range. The other guard was an AI unit. He has been shut down by wireless transmission of a code which sent him into a complete reboot. I have a copy of that same code in my long term storage.”