Aramus (2 page)

Years later, on the cyborg homeworld…

“What do you mean Seth is missing?” Aramus barked.

Holding up a hand
did nothing to stem the cacophony of questions that came flying from all directions by those present at the hastily gathered meeting. Joe waited for silence before answering. “I’d think my words were very clear. Seth is missing, as in he is no longer on this planet.”

“Is he dead?”

Negative according to Joe’s shaken head.

“But how and when? We just arrived,” Aphelion noted, an unneeded observation since all present were
well aware of that obvious fact.

Joe shrugged in a much
-too-humanlike manner. “I’m unsure of the exact time, but it appears to be not long after the arrival of the
SSBiteMe,
carrying your crew, Aramus, and our newest addition, Bonnie.”

Brows beetling together,
Aramus glared at the troublesome female who’d vexed him during the voyage. “I knew she was a traitor! Let’s kill her now.”

His logical solution did not go unchallenged.
Einstein jumped from his seat and stood in front of Bonnie. “Like hell! Bonnie couldn’t have played a part in Seth’s disappearance because she’s been with me the entire time.”

“
Maybe she was communicating with whoever did this.”

“Without a wireless transmitter?” Einstein scoffed.

“There is more than one way to send messages. I don’t know how she did it, but I’m sure she’s somehow to blame.” She was certainly to blame for the glue in Aramus’s boots, which had taken hours of soaking in a chemical solution to remove, and for the bubbles he’d belched when she handed him a bottle of water on the ship filled with liquid soap. She and the others giggled at her so-called pranks. Aramus thought they hid a devious, conniving mind, one determined to send his circuits into a closed loop, the cyborg version of insanity.

Bonnie snorted. “
Sorry, grumpy one, but you’re really grasping at straws. Instead of jumping to conclusions and letting your paranoia control you, which, by the way, they sell aluminum hats for, why not let the big boys, you know, the ones who think with actual brains instead of metal lumps, talk?”

“One, everyone knows you need a lead hat to block mind control.” He’d looked it up the first time she used that particular insult on him. “And two
—”

“There is no two because you know I had nothing to do with it because if I
had, Joe here would have already slapped me in chains.”

Damn, h
e hated it when she made sense. Joe would never let her roam around free if he suspected her, a fact Joe reinforced with a wireless message of,
She’s not responsible. So sit down, shut up, and listen.

“
You are a pain in my iron-clad ass,” Aramus grumbled as he dropped back into his seat. Despite his quick-tempered outburst, logic dictated Bonnie, the newest cyborg female to join their society, didn’t have anything to do with Seth’s disappearance. He still was of the mind they should kill her, but less because he thought she was a traitor and more because he hated that she’d stolen Einstein to the dark side, the side of—ugh—love. It was almost like a rampant disease taking good cyborg soldiers and turning them into caring beings. It made them human instead of practical. It made Aramus want to throw up the digestive acid in his stomach.

What was it about this whole love thing that
took perfectly good soldiers and turned them into human shadows of themselves? Aramus thought it should more aptly be defined as lust with a dose of madness, but no one listened to him. Hell, they all kept threatening to find him a woman of his own who’d change his mind. He’d rather donate his parts for recycling first.

Was it any wonder he wanted to save his friend from the clutches of the emasculating emotion?
He knew many would recommend he be sent for a reboot for thinking this way, but he couldn’t help it. He hated all things human, especially emotions. With Seth’s disappearance, he’d seen an opportunity to free his friend Einstein from Bonnie’s clutches, a plan that failed. But, at least he’d tried, even if it was too late. She’d already completely corrupted him.

Joe took control of the meeting with a fist slammed down on the boardroom table.
Good thing they’d built it sturdy because it wasn’t a gentle thud, and the loud noise cut through the chaos. An instant hush settled. “Everyone calm the hell down. As I was saying before I was interrupted,” Joe glared at Aramus, who subtly scratched his chin with his middle finger, “Seth is missing. And, no, Bonnie isn’t to blame. According to the short message I received, from Seth himself I might add, Seth left willingly. He just wouldn’t say with who.”

“You mean he wasn’t alone?” Aramus picked apart Joe’s words.

“No, he wasn’t.”

“So who of our ranks is also unaccounted for
?”

“No one.”

Again a barrage of questions fired at their leader from all directions. Joe held up his hand and got the quiet he wanted. “I know you all have questions. So do I. But at this point, I don’t have answers. All I know is Seth has departed the planet and he was not alone.”

“He left with a stranger?”

“Again, I don’t know. He would not elaborate. All I can confirm is whomever he vanished with is not anyone currently registered with the cyborg census bureau.”

Aphelion interrupted. “I have a different question no one seems to have asked. H
ow? How did he leave? How did this mysterious person contact him? How did any of this happen without us knowing about it?”

Joe’s fists clenched on the tabletop under the barrage of questions.
“I’m afraid we’ve no answers yet to any of those questions.”

“
You mean, you don’t know? How is this possible?” Einstein’s interest was evident in the way his mechanical eyes glowed, and he craned forward, his curious nature piqued.

“Are we
even sure he’s left the surface?”

“Yes.”

“If he’s not on the planet, then he obviously used some form of transportation.”

“
A valid assumption except our tracking devices caught no indication whatsoever of any incoming craft or communications. And trust me when I say I’ve had them going over our readings of the last few days in case we missed something. Despite the illogicalness of it, Seth is most definitely gone. Left the planet, somehow and without us detecting a thing.”

Which
made no plausible sense. They had the most advanced detection system humanity had to offer. Better actually, given they’d made modifications and improvements courtesy of their cyborg intelligence and innovation. Nothing could get past them, or at least, nothing should have.

The implication
chilled even a tough-as-a-steel-girder bastard like Aramus who didn’t feel much. If someone could come amongst them, close enough to snag one of their most capable soldiers, then what else were they capable of? It almost didn’t bear thinking of. A rational explanation had to exist. Somehow, somewhere, someone had overlooked a crucial fact.

“Are you trying to claim he pulled a Houdini? That he magically teleported himself elsewhere?” Aramus couldn’t help the caustic reply
as his BCI searched for a way to reconcile the facts with the situation—and failed.

“Logic states it’s impossible
he left without a trace, yet we cannot refute the evidence. But I wouldn’t go so far as to call it magic.”

“
Could his disappearance be linked to more of that peculiar technology the military seems to have gotten its hands on, perhaps?” Einstein mused aloud.

“You think they’ve come up with some kind of teleportation device?”

“Or a really sophisticated cloaking one. One only has to recall that tracking device we found, the one we could not detect or feel but only see, to realize the possibility exists.”

“
Speaking of which, have you made any headway on that?” Joe directed his question to their resident cybernetic geek.

Einstein shook his head. “None. I’ve dismantled the bug and put it under every microscope we have and through every test I can think of. Not only is the technology unknown
, so are the metals and polymers it’s comprised of. I haven’t yet had a chance to run tests on the items and readings from our most recent encounter with the technology, but if I were to make a completely wild guess—”

“Since when do we guess?” Aramus retorted.

Einstein continued as if he hadn’t heard. “Then I’d have to say, inconceivable as it seems, that it is alien in origin.”

“Alien as in new and never seen before?” Aphelion queried.

Einstein shook his head. “No, I mean alien as in non-human in origin. I don’t know how, but I think our military has stumbled upon advanced extraterrestrial life, or at least their technology.”

“No fucking way,” Aramus exclaimed.

“Why not?” Kyle asked. Known as the questioner, he’d often declared himself a believer in life on other planets, even if they’d yet to encounter anything smarter or larger than a horse.

Take their current home. While it boasted life, of the four
- to eight-legged, furry to scaly variety, none of it showed more than a modicum of intelligence. Definitely nothing along the lines of the intelligence evolved in humans.

“I’ll tell you why not, because there is
no way the military could keep a lid on something this big. Don’t forget, we know how things work on bases, even secret ones. Soldiers talk. They talk to their wives. Their lovers. Rumors, especially about something this momentous, would have seeped out.”

“And yet they kept the secret of how they created us
and what they did to us from the majority of humans until our public acts of retaliation could be hidden no longer.”

Heads nodded all around.

“Proving my point,” Aramus said.

“Not really. We went public
, and once we did, they manipulated the media into seeing us as monsters, attributing any event where humans died as part of a cyborg plot to overthrow humanity.”

“What if it
’s not the military who got their hands on this alien technology?” Chloe, silent up until now, spoke softly, yet everyone heard. “What if it’s the
others
, the ones funding the cyborg project. The company did a pretty decent job of hiding the fact they’d made female units. If they got their hands on alien technology, want to bet they’d do their utmost to keep it secret, even from the military?”

“It’s possible.”

Even Aramus couldn’t deny she might have a point. The unknown and secret corporation, who banked the effort to create, then eradicate, cyborgs, definitely had the money to cover up and the facilities to hide something like ET’s. The fact that it had ended up in military hands and on a military craft could just be the result of them selling their adaptations to any who could afford it.

Bonnie clapped her hands.
“This is so awesome. Maybe we’ll finally get to meet some green Martians!”

“
We have no way of knowing what they look like or the color of their exterior casing.” Einstein, as usual, stuck to the facts, and Bonnie stuck out her tongue. A tender smile, which made Aramus slightly nauseous, tilted Einstein’s lips. “But even without knowing their physical makeup, I do believe given what we’ve encountered and learned so far that the technology we are dealing with is most definitely not from Earth.”

This time the cacophony of voices could not be restrained as the cyborgs present all voiced their opinions, some aloud, some amongst each other via their wireless communicators.

Via mind-to-mind contact was how Aramus queried Joe.
Do you believe what Einstein says?

Actually, I do. It would make
sense of a lot of what we’ve encountered lately and some of the messages we’ve intercepted.

How though? And how could we not have heard about this before? We’ve been roaming the galaxy for years
, and we’ve never encountered anything that has remotely hinted that anyone else with space-faring ability inhabits the areas we’ve explored.

P
erhaps nothing does, but we’ve only visited a fraction of planets and solar systems. Who can really say what exists out there? Perhaps through some fluke or wormhole, an alien vessel somehow ended up in human hands. Depending on the technology they were dealing with, it might not have been too hard to adopt or adapt their findings.

I don’t like it.

Neither do I, but at least it gives us something to work with.

How do you figure? We have only bits and pieces of the alien junk, and nobody to dissect for
intel.
Or kill. Right about now, given his level of frustration, Aramus would have dearly loved something to use as target practice, say something in a military uniform.

That’s where you’re wrong.
We do have a lead of sorts. I didn’t want to relay this to the general populace, but Seth’s message contained a little bit more than I conveyed. He also left coordinates.