The Cyber Chronicles IX - Precipice (8 page)

Sabre nodded,
and the aide gestured to the workers' foreman, who spoke into a
tiny microphone on his cheek, which sprouted from an earpiece.
Workers streamed from the battle cruiser's hull, floated down on
antigravity platforms and gathered up their equipment before
vanishing out of the dock. Patches of Pathos' original shiny black
paint remained, but it added to her ratty appearance. Re-entering
the ship, Sabre went to the ultra-modern bridge. Pathos was no more
than three or four years old, he calculated, and had all the latest
hi-tech equipment. Data screens and consoles lined the bridge’s
smooth grey bulkheads, and the crew sat at smooth, contoured dark
grey workstations, each equipped with a monitor and keypad. Thestan
sat in the ergonomic black command chair, and his officers manned
their stations, powering up the drives.

Sabre stopped
beside the commander and watched the last of the workers file out
of the dock. The dock doors slid shut and a warning claxon brayed
outside. The battle cruiser floated up as the dock's space doors
rumbled open. Pathos drifted out and moved away from the blood-red
city ship, whose extremities were folded close to her hull, the
long, segmented tail stretched out behind. Starlight glinted on the
ancient, scarred ship, a veteran of many battles, judging by her
pitted flanks and gouged arms, some of them remnants of Fairen's
ramming the Moth Ship to save him.

When the
Scorpion Ship had shrunk to fit into the screens, a shimmer of
white light engulfed it and a gravity shockwave rippled outwards,
then it was gone. Sabre fingered the bracelet on his wrist and
turned to Thestan.

"Get the hell
out of my chair."

The commander
rose and moved away, and Sabre took his place. "You're demoted to
sub-commander, pass it on. Since Fairen brought us closer to the
Dellan Station and left Kole behind, I'm going to assume that he
told him to catch up. Set course for the Dellan Station."

Thestan relayed
the order to the cyber pilot, and Sabre frowned at the screens as
they headed for the closest corridor. He had grown accustomed to
the Scorpion Ship's method of instant travel, and disliked the idea
of spending two hours cooped up with a bunch of enforcers. The
tension on the bridge made Sabre's nerves jangle, adding to his
foul mood.

That, plus the
dark lump of emotional trauma that sat in the back of his mind like
a crouching beast, making his breath catch every so often in an
irrational emotional reaction, stretched his frayed nerves to
breaking point. Martis was right, he wanted to find a dark corner
and curl up in it to escape this hopeless quest and its inevitable
failure. After half an hour he stood up.

"Thestan, take
over, I'm going to have a rest. I hope you've cleared your shit out
of my cabin."

The
sub-commander stared over his head. "I'll have it done now."

Sabre glanced
around at the rest of the officers, most of whom looked away,
frowning. He stepped closer to Thestan, and a muscle jumped in the
sub-commander's jaw. Sabre glared up at the tall man.

"Oh, I get it,
Thestan, I really do. You're not used to taking orders from a
damned cyber, are you? And yeah, I say 'I' and 'me' and even 'my'."
He glanced around again. "You're all going to have a tough time
with it, I can tell. But you'd better bloody well get used to it,
and fast, understand? And you'd better start tacking a damned 'sir'
onto the end of those clipped sentences. I know what you're
thinking. You've got four cybers on this ship, and I'm only one.
Take me back to your cronies on Myon Two, and you're heroes,
right?"

A muscle
twitched in Thestan's cheek again. "We will obey Overlord
Fairen."

"You really
think I'm going to trust you? I want your cybers' overrides,
now."

Thestan nodded
to a crewman, and Sabre stalked around the bridge while he waited,
pausing beside each man to study him before moving on to the next.
The tension rose, becoming thick enough to hit with a hammer by the
time the crewman returned and handed over four overrides. Sabre
took them and went to the commander's cabin, where more crewmen
were carrying out the last of Thestan's belongings. He flopped down
on the bed and closed his eyes, turning his attention to the
confusion of emotional debris in his head.

It still
threatened to swamp him, ebbing and surging in waves of raw,
unbridled and unwelcome sensations, which he did not understand,
and he was not sure he wanted to plumb their illogical depths. It
had been so powerful when the wall had first failed it had
threatened to push him into catatonia. He had wanted to escape it,
but there was nowhere to run. It terrified him. His logical mind
rejected it as useless data, and he had spent those minutes on
Fairen's bridge stuffing most of it into as many dark recesses in
his mind as he could find.

A lot of it he
had shoved into the dark void where his mocking voice lived, and it
had silenced its cruel jibes. He was no longer just a cyborg, he
was more, he had feelings. Too many of them. His mind shied away
from them, and all thoughts of Tassin. Thinking of her brought a
rush of strange and alarming impulses, ranging from a strong wish
to open an airlock and step out into space, to a powerful urge to
crush the skull of whoever had taken her. Despair, Fairen had
called it. He tried to analyse it, but his mind ran in circles,
failing to find a logical explanation for it. He was a machine with
human emotions. He was a human with a machine mind. He was a
wreck.

Certainly he
was intensely angry, and the feeling would not abate. Whereas
before he had experienced occasional spurts of anger that quickly
faded to a dull background of simmering hatred for Myon Two, now he
could not shake off the fury that filled him. He tossed on the bed,
rubbing his brow. He tried switching the control unit off, but that
made it worse, and he considered letting the cyber take charge, so
he could slide into the peaceful, enervating darkness. Surges of
rage made his hands clench, followed by waves of a strange feeling
that clogged is throat and made it hard to breathe.

Cursing, he
jumped up and left the cabin, shoved aside two crewmen in the
corridor and marched down to the exercise room in the bowels of the
ship. A row of punching bags lined one wall, and he started on
them, his fists ripping through the tough outer skin and shredding
the dense foam inside. When he had demolished all of them, he went
over to the rack of weights and picked up the heaviest, which a
normal man could barely lift, and hurled it across the room,
denting the wall. A crewman stuck his head through the door and
goggled at him, retreating when a dumbbell smashed into the wall
beside his head.

Chapter Four

Martis looked
up from adjusting an analyser when Thestan entered the hospital.
Boxes of half unpacked equipment littered the white, grey-floored
room, jostling for space with the standard medical equipment that
was used for injured crewmen. The enforcer ship had little in the
way of cyber host repair apparatus, and setting up the delicate
instruments was a tricky job. Especially since neither he nor
Estrelle were engineers. They knew how to use the stuff, but
setting it up was a whole different ballgame. Two crewmen helped,
but, although they were maintenance techs, they knew nothing about
control unit analysers or brain scanners either.

The sub
commander approached Martis, his expression grim. "Your, err,
friend is in the process of tearing up the exercise room, Host
Tech. Could you speak to him?"

Martis
swallowed, glancing at Estrelle. "I don't know about that,
Commander."

"Well someone's
got to do something about him. He's out of control, and when he's
finished in there, he might decide to start on the crew."

"And you think
I can stop him?"

Thestan's frown
deepened. "Isn't he your friend?"

"I think
Estrelle would have more success."

"Why's
that?"

Martis put down
the light reader. "Well, she's a woman, for one thing, and perhaps
a little more his friend than me."

"Why does her
sex have anything to do with it?"

"I think Sabre
is in the process of discovering the drawbacks of being human,
namely all the illogical emotional shit that comes with it. Right
now, he's bloody angry, and another male would only aggravate that.
Also, from his machine-mind point of view, she's not a threat, so
she'd be safer."

Estrelle stared
at him, shaking her head. "If he's tearing up the exercise room,
I'm not going to be target practice."

"He won't hurt
you."

"You don't know
that."

"Yeah, I do.
I'm the expert, remember? Personally, I'd rather leave him alone to
blow off steam, because that's what he's doing. But if you really
want him to stop, Commander, Estrelle's your best bet."

Estrelle
snorted. "You're just too cowardly to face him."

"No, I've got
more sense. He does need someone to talk to, though."

"Let's wait
till Kole catches up. He knows Sabre better."

Martis shook
his head. "He'd definitely get used for target practise. He's
annoying."

Thestan cast
Estrelle a pleading look. "I'd be most grateful, Cyber Tech.
According to the man who saw the exercise room, there's not much of
it left."

Martis picked
up the light reader again. "Yeah, well, he's a cyber, Commander,
what do you expect? He can punch right through two centimetres of
reinforced duronium alloy."

"He'd hurt his
fist," Estrelle pointed out.

"True. I don’t
think he’d care, right now, though."

She sighed and
put down her magnotester. "Fine, I'll see if he'll talk to me, but
if he throws anything at me, that's it."

Thestan nodded
and led the way to the exercise room. The sounds of its destruction
were audible from far down the corridor. A few nervous-looking men
listened to the ruckus, and hurried away when Estrelle came past.
Apparently they expected her to spark the simmering cyber into an
explosion. She paused outside the door, fighting a strong urge to
refuse to go in, then pressed the panel beside it, and it slid
open. A weight rack hit the wall beside the door, making her jump
and yelp. She longed to run, but her legs did not seem to work.

Sabre stood in
the middle of the room, a ten-kilogram dumbbell in each hand,
eyeing her. "Estrelle."

She gulped, her
mind blank. "Sabre."

"What brings
you to this den of destruction?"

"I want to talk
to you."

The cyber
hefted a dumbbell and hurled it at the wall. It bounced off with a
clang, leaving a dent. "What about?"

"Your penchant
for pandemonium?"

"I'm angry."
Sabre hurled the second dumbbell.

"I can
tell."

The cyber
turned and strode towards her, and she backed away, bumping into
the wall. Reaching her, he slammed his hands on the wall on either
side her head with a terrific double bang, making her ears ring,
and she gasped.

Sabre thrust
his face close to hers and bellowed, "I hate these feelings!"

"I know, of
course you do, you don't understand them," she gabbled, her heart
doing a fandango in her throat.

"I don't want
to understand them. I want them to go away!"

"Well, they
won't. You're going to have to learn to deal with them."

Sabre swung
away, walked a few paces and sank down in a heap, bowing his head.
Estrelle hesitated, then went over and knelt beside him. Sweat
sheened his skin and ran down his face, and his chest heaved. She
reached out to him, then snatched her hand back, recalling Martis'
warning. Sabre turned his head slightly, glaring at the floor.

"Don't touch
me."

He did not need
to look at her to see her, she knew. He was either using the
scanners or the optical inputs, and she wondered why. "Okay. But
you need human contact now more than ever. You need comfort."

"Not from
you."

"Then who?"

He shook his
head. "Tassin."

"We will find
her."

"The chances of
that are -"

"No, don't go
into machine mode on me now. I want to talk to the new Sabre, the
one who's just been unleashed from his cage."

"The
beast."

She nodded.
"Yes. The one with all those feelings, who doesn't know how to
cope."

"I can't...
cope."

"You can. We
all do it. I know what you're doing. You're venting, and on
inanimate objects, which is good, although if you carry on you'll
wreck the ship. Enough is enough."

He raised
silver eyes filled with anguish. "I can make myself calm, but it
doesn't stop the shit in my head. This helps."

"Yeah, it
would. Tell me what you're feeling."

"Anger. Lots of
that. Hatred, for those smug bastards out there, who look at me
like I'm a deformed toad they just found in their shorts. And
others. I might never get her back, never find her again."

"Despair."

He nodded. "And
what must she be going through now? Is someone hurting her? Is she
all right?"

"Anguish."

"And why did
this happen? Why her? Why now?"

"Bitterness."

"I want her
back, more than anything. I want to see her again, hold her..." He
shook his head, bowing it again.

"Love."

"That I know.
I've felt it before, but not this strong."

Estrelle edged
closer, shifting into a more comfortable position. His eyes
followed her movement, but he did not raise his head. Instinct told
her that if she touched him now, he would lash out, yet he did not
understand why.

"You're also
finding it difficult to control yourself, aren't you?" she
asked.

He nodded.
"You're not safe. You should leave."