UNIT 78: RESCUED (CyBRG Files Book 2) Read online

  Copyright © 2018 by Mina Carter & Evangeline Anderson

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Cover: Reese Dante

  *Cover content is for illustrative purposes only. Any person depicted on the cover is a model.*

  Rescued (Unit 78)

  CyBRG Files

  Mina Carter

  Evangeline Anderson

  New York Times & USA Today Bestselling Authors

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Also by Mina Carter

  Also by Evangeline Anderson

  About Mina Carter

  About Evangeline Anderson

  Chapter One

  Humans were shit-scared of rogue cyborgs.

  Unit 78, formerly Corporal Richard Hardgraves, stood silently in the grav-lift, his gaze fixed on the doors in front of him. A unit of marines stood around him, armed to the teeth. They were his “escorts” for his meeting with Admiral Pierce, and they’d met him at the airlock when he’d arrived. Even now he could smell the fear leaching out of their pores.

  He didn’t blame them though. They’d no doubt been fed horror stories about him and his kind. He certainly had when he’d been human. There were tales of early prototypes who had gone on killing sprees, their control subroutines corrupted so they saw anything and everything as a threat—soldiers, civilians, their own kind, random hunks of rock…

  He’d even been called into a hostage situation with one a few years back. A cyborg had taken a base mechanic hostage and had killed the three teams sent in before their superiors had gotten some sense in their heads and called in the expert. AKA Rich. An expert in negotiation and hostage recovery, he’d been at the top of his game.

  It had taken a few hours and bringing in an expert in computer coding to help him understand what was going on in the thing’s metal skull, but they’d finally managed to crack through the cyborg’s subroutine lock and gotten it to release the technician. Unfortunately, the logical reasoning Rich had employed had locked the thing down, rendering it useless as it tried to process out of the loop he’d put it into. He remembered looking at it with pity as it had been hauled off by CyBRG technicians, a hunk of metal and flesh that was once a man, once a soldier. Like him.

  But that cyborg had been nothing like him, nor the rest of his group. The CyBRG program took soldiers killed in action, those who were confirmed as brain-dead, and cyberized them into the ultimate fighting machines. That was the way it was supposed to go, anyway—until an asshole called Pike had seen the potential profit in selling CyBRG units on the black market.

  Supply and demand had meant that Pike needed more fodder for his money-making scheme. A land mine had taken out several teams, including Rich’s. Thanks to conveniently malfunctioning medical equipment, the medical teams hadn’t been able to tell they weren’t brain-dead and had cyberized them anyway on Pike’s orders.

  But cyberizing a body with a live brain was very different from cyberizing one that was brain-dead. For one thing, they didn’t take orders well to kill innocent civilians. Within weeks they’d broken their programming and gone rogue, fighting Pike’s forces to avoid annihilation. Under the command of their leader, Drew Fisher, they’d won. Pike was dead, and rather than admit they’d fucked up majorly, the Space Corps was busy denying their existence completely.

  Until, it seemed, the Corps, or rather one of their admirals, needed something from them. Hence the reason Rich was standing in a lift with a group of marines who had obviously all drawn the short straw. The marine to his left appeared to be muttering the last rites under his breath, and the one on the right was sweating, a bead of perspiration detaching itself from his brow and rolling slowly down the side of his face. Since the temperature was slightly cooler than comfortable for a standard human, he wasn’t hot. He was scared shitless.

  Rich kept his smile to himself and looked straight ahead, playing up the cyborg act for all he was worth. Even among the rogue units, he was heavily cyberized.

  His right arm was all metal, the entire shoulder cradle replaced and armored. One side of his jaw carried visible implants embedded in the skin, smaller units disappearing up into his hairline. Under his form-fitting body armor, similar implants decorated his collarbones, and the lines just inside his hips, down his spine and further down on his legs. They were mounting points for heavier hardware that would integrate with the cybernetics that laced his entire system and turn him into a cyber-organic tank. Under his armor, both legs were gone beneath the knee, replaced with metal.

  All in all, he looked like one scary motherfucker.

  They were right to be afraid of him. He could drop everyone in the lift within 3.87 seconds and not be out of breath. He wouldn’t even need the pulse pistols holstered at his hips to do it. Brute force and speed that no human could comprehend would do the job just as well.

  The lift slowed to a stop and the doors opened. Without waiting for the marines around him, Rich stepped forward, letting them scurry to follow. They appeared to be on the admiralty level of Pierce’s Flagship, the Redoubt, and, by the looks of it, all personnel had been cleared. Like the docking ring and his route up here.

  Obviously Pierce didn’t want people knowing he was dealing with the cyborgs.

  “This way…” One of the marines said and then paused, obviously at a loss for what to call Rich. Not surprising. None of them wore name tags or rank indicators anymore. There was no need. After their…conversion, rank was meaningless. Some of them had become comfortable using their old names, but some had chosen new ones to reflect their new natures.

  “Unit 78,” Rich said, his voice emotionless. Sure, he had a name and used it back home, but these assholes didn’t deserve to know what it was.

  “This way, Unit 78,” the marine replied, his tight expression saying he was uncomfortable with Rich. Tough shit. They had called for help, so they could just suck it up.

  He was led down the corridor and into a conference room. Ignoring the chair that had been offered to him, Rich stood motionless in the middle of the room and studied his environment without appearing to. It was swish, with deep, plush carpets, heavy wooden furniture and actual art on the walls. He had no idea who the artists were, but his ocular implants easily picked up that the works were real and finely done. No doubt they’d cost a fortune. The whole place was a far cry from the environments he’d been used to as a member of the Marine Corps.

  How the other half lived…

  “Ahh, it’s here.”

  The comment preceded the arrival of Admiral Brock Pierce through an open door opposite the one Rich had arrived through. He had a glimpse of a similarly plush lounge before it swooshed shut behind the medal and braid bedecked admiral.

  Idly, his onboard processor noted and listed what each decoration was for, in a scrolling list overlaid on top of the vision in his left eye. It was an impressive list. The admiral had seen action in all the major engagements in the last half century.

  However, his active uplink to the ship’s mainframe also informed him that while the admiral had technically s