Kiss of Steel, page 1
KISS OF STEEL
Cosmic Mates 3
Cara Bristol
Kiss of Steel (Cosmic Mates 3)
Copyright © October 2024 by Cara Bristol
All rights reserved. This copy is intended for the original purchaser of this e-book ONLY. No part of this e-book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without prior written permission from the author. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
eISBN: 978-1-947203-80-8
Editor: Kate Richards
Copy Editor: Nan Sipe
Proofreader: Celeste Jones
Cover Artist: Sweet ‘N Spicy Designs
Formatting by Wizards in Publishing
Published in the United States of America
Cara Bristol Website: https://carabristol.com
This e-book is a work of fiction. While reference might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Can she find refuge in the arms of a killer cyborg?
Bio-engineered to be an assassin, cyborg Jason Steel is targeted for destruction after he runs afoul of his creators. He escapes, and, passing himself off as human, seeks asylum on planet Refuge. Since couples are given priority, he applies for a wife through the Cosmic Mates interplanetary matchmaking program.
He loathes shackling himself to a wife just as he can taste freedom, so he intends to jettison the ball and chain as soon as he fulfills the contract requirements.
Honoria Foster is on the run from a hit man. After overhearing her boss plotting a murder, she testifies against him in court. But he’s acquitted, and now she’s in the crosshairs. In desperation, she submits an application to Cosmic Mates as a way to get off Earth. To her immense relief, she gets a match.
Her new husband isn’t the alien she expected, but a human—a cold, rude, rather scary man. But she finds solace in the fact that she’ll be safe at Haven Ranch on planet Refuge.
Mutual dislike puts their marriage on a rocky footing, but, as they’re forced to cooperate with one another to adapt to a new life on a strange planet, friendship and mutual respect begin to grow, and amity soon blooms into attraction, passion, and love.
But Steel’s secret past remains a threat to their sanctuary and their marriage. Will Honoria still love him when she finds out the man she married is a cold-blooded killing machine?
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Other Titles by Cara Bristol
About Cara Bristol
Acknowledgements
Chapter One
Somewhere in outer space
Steel awakened to darkness. One by one, senses booted up. Auditory receptors noted a faint hum, and olfaction detected burning metal, the peculiar odor of outer space, while his tactile sensors recorded a vibration against his spine. Information synchronized. I’m on a spaceship.
No visuals yet. Flinging out his arms, he hit solid metal above him, to the sides, and below. Containment pod. I’m in a containment pod. Hazy memories replayed how he’d been forced into the capsule as his systems had powered down.
His hand flew to the immobilizer around his neck. The electronic device had enabled his captors to control him. He dug his fingers under the tight band and yanked hard, breaking it loose.
Free, he thought with vicious satisfaction.
But the hot metal smell concerned him. He sniffed, speculating as to the possible cause. An engine core malfunction? Lingering remnants of bay doors having been opened? Or a hull breach? If he broke free of the capsule, and there was a gaping hole in the craft, he’d get sucked out of the ship. Even a cyborg couldn’t withstand the extremes of outer space.
He palmed the metal walls of the pod. Cool, but not frozen. So, no hull breach.
He attuned his hearing and listened for voices but heard only the ship’s faint rumble.
Balling his hand into a fist, he rammed the top of the pod. Pain splintered through his knuckles and fingers and radiated up his forearm, but his processor shifted the uncomfortable sensation into the background, and he punched again. The metal dented. Another strike caved it farther. Wetness trickled down his hand. He was bleeding. Bones might have been fractured. With the next punch, he broke all the way through, slicing his skin on the sharp metal. Faint red light filtered in. Grasping the edges of the hole with both hands, he ripped open the top of the pod and squeezed out of the pod.
Red auxiliary lighting revealed a cargo hold filled with crates, some metal, some wood. He held up his throbbing, bleeding hand and watched the hemorrhage peter out, and the mostly organic skin heal itself. He wiped the blood on his naked thigh. He’d been stripped of his clothing before he’d been placed in the pod.
Silently, he padded around the bay searching for something to use as a weapon. He could kill with his bare hands, but he wasn’t invincible, as the capture, deactivation, and containment had proven.
He tore open several crates, finding only detritus—miscellaneous parts for obsolete robos, hovercraft, computers, and other junk. Nothing of practical value—except for the information. All the crates were stamped DESTINATION: HELL’S GATE. Nobody with half a brain would pay the freight to dispose of this worthless crap by shipping it to Hell’s Gate.
Out of environmental concerns, incinerators, including crematoriums, had been banned on Earth. Bodies and anything else anybody wished to dispose of without a trace got shipped to Hell’s Gate, a planet of molten rock. But items had to be recorded on a flight manifest. Hence, the crates of junk camouflaged the only cargo worth sending to Hell’s Gate. Him. Solutions, Inc. intended him to disappear without a trace.
They’ll never take me alive. Not again.
After the Chicago incident and resulting trial, all cyborgs had been tricked into reporting for deactivation. Earth authorities had been promised the man-machines would be destroyed. The cyborgs had been told they were reporting for another assignment. Solutions had fed both sides a line of crap.
Except, he’d already gone AWOL. Balking at an assignment, he’d ripped out his tracking chip and bolted. Unfortunately, the precaution hadn’t been enough to save him. Solutions excelled in finding people who didn’t want to be found. He had been zapped with a pulsator, collared, shoved into the pod, and deactivated. They hadn’t deactivated him until after placing him in the capsule because they intended for him to know his fate.
You belong to us. We created you. We’ll take you out.
Had he turned himself in, he probably would have been deactivated but then redeployed at a later date after public outrage subsided and memories faded. But he was fed up with the bullshit of being owned. The government classified cyborgs in the same category as robots. That they were mostly human organic material didn’t matter. Solutions legally owned him.
He’d been created in the robotics lab, beginning as a fertilized human embryo then genetically and cybernetically modified. “Born” from a gestation tank, he’d emerged as a perfect mature adult killing machine.
He didn’t remember when dissatisfaction with his lot in life had begun; perhaps it had started when he began to suspect maybe not all targets deserved to die. Most marks were predators who posed a grave danger to their fellow humans. Executing them amounted to a public service. But could that be true of all of them? The dossiers were sometimes sketchy on the details.
Out of doubt, a longing for personal license had kindled.
His first act of self-determination had been to walk away from his mark in the park. Then the shit hit the fan over the Chicago incident. In his second act of personal autonomy, he’d opted not to report as ordered but to remain gone for good.
Freedom had been short. But now it appeared he’d been given a second chance.
What had reactivated him anyway?
How long had he been in the pod? How close was he to Hell’s Gate? Would anyone come to check on the cargo? To check on him? He was the only cargo that mattered.
Cocking his head, he listened. The engine noise should have been deafening. Located right over the hyperdrive, the cargo bay provided a sound buffer, putting space between the engines and the rest of the ship. The hold was eerily quiet, except for a hum that sounded more like an auxiliary system than the main hyperdrive core. The lack of overt engine noise coupled with the low-level scarlet lighting suggested power failure.
Were repairs in the works? He didn’t hear mechanics working, but if the problem was electronic, and not mechanical, the AI would fix it, and there would be nothing to hear. But once it got fixed, somebody—human or android—would conduct a sweep of the ship. He needed to be ready. He resumed his search for a weapon.
Having found nothing of any use, ten minutes later he was abo
Somebody else is here.
He whirled around as the cargo bay door peeled open.
Chapter Two
Steel dropped into a fighting stance, his heart pumping oxygenated blood to his muscles.
“Oh good, you’re awake,” the cyborg said.
“What the fuck do you want?” Steel said.
“Easy, dude. We’re on the same side.” Cheeks dimpled, but the affable grin didn’t reach his eyes.
Steel used that same smile sans dimples to lure targets into a false sense of security. “What side is that?” He sized up his adversary, noting no obvious weapons on his person. The pocketless, beltless one-piece uniform had no place to hide them. But a cyborg was lethal enough without a weapon. A cyborg was a weapon.
“Fugitives.”
“I’ve heard that one before.” The cyborg who’d betrayed him had claimed to be on the lam, too.
“Not from me.”
“And who the fuck are you?”
“I’m model C5-105, code name Fury, but you can call me Mike. Seeing how I’m footloose and fancy free for the first time in my life, I’m celebrating the milestone with a name change.”
C5-105 meant he was a fifth iteration, the 105th out of the gestation tank. Steel, C5-104, had preceded him, making them brothers of sorts. However, cyborgs had neither kith nor kin, there being little trust or friendship among the units. They worked in tandem to the extent required to achieve their directives, but Solutions called the shots. At any time, if ordered, they would turn on each other, he’d learned through bitter experience.
And despite their gestational proximity, they shared no “family likeness.” Blue-eyed, fair-haired C5-105 looked more like a celebrity heartthrob than a heartless killer—a huge asset in their line of work. No one expected an assassin to be baby-faced and handsome.
Steel’s advantage was his ability to blend in and pass for any number of human races. With his brown skin, hair, and eyes, he could be of African descent, Indian, Middle Eastern, Hispanic, Indigenous North or South American. His generic face enabled him to kill and slip away unnoticed.
“And you are?” Fury prompted.
“None of your fucking business.”
“Well, it’s a little long, but if that’s the name you want to use… Okay if I call you Fucking?”
“Okay if I call you Dipshit?”
“We don’t know each other, but, like it or not, we’re in this together. We can cooperate to get our asses off this ship, or we can wait for Solutions to discover we weren’t incinerated and let them finish the job.”
Once a threat, always a threat. C5-105’s congenial kumbaya didn’t fool him. But he was right about the urgency of getting off the ship. “Do you have any idea what happened? It feels like the ship is drifting in space.”
He nodded. “It is. The electronics got knocked out. Coulda been solar flares, coronal mass ejection, or cosmic rays, but some sort of electromagnetic surge toasted the robo crew, too. We’re fortunate we were powered down when it hit, or we’d be like the robos—lights out, nobody coming home.” He had a way with words, using human colloquialisms to appear congenial, nonthreatening. A cyborg’s ability to adapt and assimilate was why Solutions, Inc. had deployed them instead of androids as assassins. No matter how good the synthetic skin and programming, you could always spot a bot. A mostly organic machine was harder to detect.
The surge is probably what disabled the collars and reactivated us. Anything electronic switched to ON would have been fried, and anything OFF could have been turned on.
The surge had unsealed C5-105’s pod. “You didn’t think to check on me? Or did you even look?”
He shrugged. “Well, Fucking, I did notice your pod. I assumed you were either dead or were perfectly capable of getting yourself out. I considered reconnaissance a more pressing need than babysitting. Are you always so grumpy after reactivation?”
Steel let the dig slide. Fury wasn’t wrong when he said there were more pressing concerns. “On your reconnaissance, did you happen to discover how long we’ve been adrift? How much time we have left?”
“Time left, as in how long before Solutions comes looking for us or before the auxiliary power quits and we run out of oxygen?”
Fuck. He hadn’t considered the latter. Due to their fast metabolism, cyborgs required more oxygen than the average human. At rest, they burned more oxygen than a human running at full speed.
“We’ve been in space five days,” Fury replied. “We’re a day from Hell’s Gate. The surge occurred about an hour ago. Auxiliary power core has already dropped to 90 percent. We need to shut off some shit—lights, heat, grav simulation. Reduce the power suck.”
“I’m surprised this much is running on aux power when the crew is robotic.” Robos didn’t need light or an ambient temperature; their processors ran better in cooler temps anyway. Notoriously heavy, they could function in lower gravity. Earth’s gravity was 9.8 newtons per kilogram. Spaceship artificial gravity was 8 N/kg. Robos, depending on their specific weight, could function at three or even two.
Why did a ship occupied by robos need light, heat, and gravity? Why use auxiliary power to create a comfortable atmosphere for robos that didn’t need it when it could be used to complete the mission or ensure the ship got to a space station? It wasn’t for two deactivated cyborgs slated for destruction.
He fixed a gaze on Fury’s affable face. When the pulse had fried the electronics, it would have rendered the ship’s logs inaccessible. How had Fury determined the timelines? “There were humans aboard,” he concluded.
“Two Solutions reps.”
“You killed them.”
“You got a problem with that?”
“Only that I didn’t have the pleasure myself.”
“Sorry. My bad. I should have saved one for you.”
His creator had intended to kill him. Steel had a score to settle. He considered every human working with Solutions complicit in his enslavement and near-destruction. If he encountered anyone from the company again, that individual would have a split second to kiss his or her ass goodbye. “I assume you interrogated them first?”
“Do I look like a rookie? In exchange for information, I promised them a quick and merciful death.”
“Were they?” He didn’t care one way or another, but the answer would tell him something about Fury.
“I’m a cyborg of my word. They didn’t have much information, but I did obtain the timelines and confirmation of our destination—and that they had managed to send a distress call to headquarters.”
“The ship’s comm system still works?”
“No. But one of them had dug up a first-generation tech-tab that had been powered down. So, it was operable. Hard to believe anybody still uses those things. But it did what they wanted it to.”
Tech-tabs were little better than children’s toys. Having advanced to more sophisticated devices, Earth no longer used them but shipped them to its agrarian colony on Terra Nova. The farmers and villagers didn’t know what they lacked. They probably considered themselves fortunate to have electricity and indoor plumbing.
“A tow ship is on the way. Should arrive in a couple of days,” Fury said.
“We’re sitting ducks.”
“Which is why we need to vacate pronto.”
“How are we supposed to do that?”
“Pilot the emergency life shuttle pod.”
“There’s a shuttle pod on this ship?”
“Yeah. And it’s operable. It was shielded in case of a situation just like this one. That’s where I found the reps—in the launch bay, getting ready to evacuate.”
It took a moment for the implication to sink in.
“You came back for me.” Instead of leaving the ship, Fury had returned to the cargo bay. An unfamiliar emotion rushed through him. Nobody had ever done anything for him without expecting something in return. No one had his six. On assignments, his partners had defended him only because the mission required it.
“Yes, Fucking, I did.”
“Why?”
“I figure we’re partners in crime. I know why they were sending me to Hell’s Gate, and I assumed you were going for a similar reason.”
