Tovian Read online

  Tovian

  A Cyborg Warrior Tale

  A short story from

  the Ardak Chronicles

  Immortal Angel

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Tovian

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Fallen Press, Ltd.

  Copyright © 2018

  This book is protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material or artwork herein is prohibited without the express written permission of the author.

  ISBN: 978-1-948243-08-7

  Other works by Immortal Angel

  Tordan: Cyborg Warriors

  Roihan: Cyborg Warriors

  Simban: Cyborg Warriors

  For John

  Chapter One

  Tovian

  Tov strode toward the security room, a feeling of satisfaction in his chest. All was well aboard the Flouriant space station, the largest trading station in this sector of the Cetus galaxy. The three rings were spinning smoothly, O2 production was at 100 percent, and crime was at zero.

  And it was almost the end of his shift. Keeping the station free from thieves, sex trafficking, and all other kinds of crimes was a full-time job. But as a cyborg from Thlibo, he was well suited to the position. He’d been running security for five years now, and his reputation kept the station mostly free of crime. The rest he took care of with his abilities. His cybernetic enhancements allowed him to see in the dark and scan through walls, as well as react faster, run farther, and kick harder than most beings.

  Plus, he was just smart. And he knew how criminals thought.

  Just as he was entering the final corridor, his second in command beeped Tov on his wrist com.

  He clicked the button. “What?”

  “Tov, sir, there’s an emergency transmission.”

  “Be right there. And stop calling me sir, dammit.” Tov shook his head and hurried the last few steps to the command center. His second in command, Exian, was also a cyborg from his homeworld of Thlibo, but he’d been born into the military rather than joining voluntarily as Tov had. Meaning he had difficulty with the use of first names.

  Tov threw open the door to the command center, ignoring the other guards and crossing the floor with several strides. “Put it on-screen.”

  Immediately, the face of his friend Vindan appeared on the large monitor in front of them. “Tov, my friend.”

  He hadn’t seen the other cyborg since they’d escaped Thlibo, and therefore escaped control of the Ardaks who had invaded their planet and turned them into cyborgs. Vindan appeared hale and healthy, his hair and beard trimmed short, and his skin a tanned color. “Vindan. Good to see you.”

  “And you.” The man’s face turned grave. “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you this, but there’s a bomb on the Flouriant, as well as several other stations. They’re set to go off in thirty-three minutes. You must evacuate immediately.”

  Tovian’s gut twisted and he took an involuntary step back. “What? How do you know?”

  Irritating fuzz began to creep into the feed.

  “We caught a group of Gravelins.” Vindan’s face got closer to the cam, but the signal was worsening. “They were trying…on our station…we coerced…into talking.”

  Tov strode forward and hit the fuzzy monitor with his hand. Gravelins? Why would they try to blow up the space stations?

  “…same time on all stations…evacuate now, Tovian…thirty-two minutes. Sorry, my friend.” The screen went dark.

  Tov turned and kicked the metal storage cabinet, trying to think of everything he knew about Gravelins. The strange, walking reptilian creatures came from a swampy planet and had a mean bite.

  Exian turned to him. “Sir? Is there a bomb on the station?”

  “Probably! Vindan has never been known to lie. Or to be wrong.” He lifted his wrist and set the timer for thirty minutes, then hit the com button on his watch. “Alert! Bomb on the station! This is not a drill. Grab the explosive detectors. Go through the station level by level—I want this whole damn station covered in ten minutes.” He clicked off, then clicked on again. “And if you see any Gravelins, do not let them bite you. Their venom is deadly.”

  The three others who’d been watching in silence grabbed detectors and sprinted out of the office. At his nod, Exian also departed. No hesitation, no questions asked.

  He loved his team.

  Pressing a red button on his wrist device, he called Rilian, the station’s owner. And probably soon to be his former friend.

  “Hello?” The word sounded slightly groggy.

  “Rilian. I just received word from Vindan that there’s a bomb on the station, set to go off in thirty. If we can’t find and disarm it, evacuation in fifteen.” He ran his hand through his hair, waiting for Rilian’s reaction. “I’m sorry, Ril. “

  “It’s not your fault.” The other cyborg’s voice was surprisingly alert now. “It’s those damn Gravelins, isn’t it?”

  “How did you know?”

  “There’s no time to explain. Tell me when you find that bomb.”

  Tov disengaged and grabbed a detector, heading for the docking bay. Perhaps he’d get lucky and it would be on one of the cargo ships that had recently docked. They had hundreds of cargo ships per day, which meant it was always a security risk.

  But just as he arrived, his com device beeped. He brought the watch up and hit the button. “Talk.”

  “We think we’ve found the bomb. A bunch of weird walking reptilian things are guarding it. Level 3, purple zone.”

  The sounds of gunfire blasted through the com.

  “Shit, sir, I think they’re trying to get away.”

  “Be there in thirty seconds.” Tov powered up his chip, allowing him to sprint twice as quickly. The purple zone was where passenger ships docked, the level just below this one, and thankfully it wasn’t far.

  However, its location was unfortunate, because depending on the size of the bomb, when it blew it would obliterate all of the civilian vessels, and many of the cargo ships in the level above.

  Meaning they would have to evacuate before that happened.

  When he arrived in the purple zone, his men had the Gravelins cornered in a storage room, exchanging fire.

  His men were being careful with their bullets, trying to protect the integrity of the station, but the Gravelins obviously had no such issues. Bullets flew wildly in all directions.

  He checked his watch. Twenty-six minutes.

  He used his ocular implant to scan the small storage room. There were nine of them, all armed with Gravelin spears and Ardak ray guns.

  And the bomb behind them was enormous.

  How did they get something that size into the room without my men seeing it?

  He’d try to keep one alive to find out. Maybe. Engaging in battle always filled him with rage. Every time he grabbed a weapon, especially his sword, he was reminded of what the Ardaks had done to his home planet. But in times like this, that rage was his friend.

  He clenched his fists, grabbing a blaster in each hand. He’d save the sword for when the fighting got up close and personal.

  “All right, men. Watch out.” His voice was gritty.

  “Oh good. I didn’t miss anything,” Exian’s voice came from behind the others and they parted to let him through. “You may begin.” The other man’s grin was feral as he palmed his blasters.

  Tov knew his matched it.

  The others moved aside, falling in behind them for backup.

&nb
sp; And now they were going to kick some Gravelin ass.

  Chapter Two

  Callie

  “Dammit.” Callie smacked the console as the bank of monitors on the left went fuzzy for the seventh time. And that was just this shift. After fixing them the first six times, she’d been looking forward to going back to her domicile to sleep. All she’d needed was one more hour.

  But obviously that wasn’t going to happen.

  She rose and pushed a lock of pale pink hair behind one of her pointed ears. She grabbed her tool belt, then moved the chair so she could get under the console.

  Damned archaic wiring.

  She adjusted several wires and glanced up once more, but fuzz and static was her only view.

  And she needed that view.

  Without it, she wouldn’t be able to see Tov, and she didn’t even want to contemplate that possibility.

  He was the six-foot-three, impossibly handsome cyborg head of security. Who was also unofficially her boss, even though she tried to forget that as often as possible. Technically, she reported to Rilian, the cyborg who owned the station. But since she monitored the station and Tov defended it, more often than not she was taking directives from him. Not that she minded.

  Tov would never know it, but she spent every day following his body from monitor to monitor with hungry fascination. His muscles rippled beneath the tight shirts and formfitting pants, and his moves were strong and efficient as he strode across the market floor or down the halls, interrogating suspects and taking down perpetrators.

  It was what got her through her sixteen-hour shifts.

  Her job was alerting him to possible suspects. It was nearly impossible to catch them all, even when the damned monitors worked. Criminals were ever-present, their methods more subtle and more devious by the day. And those were only the petty criminals.

  They also had some big fish trying to play in the criminal pond, which is where Tov came in. He was good at what he did. Very good. His piercing blue eyes were always canvassing the crowd, and he had a knack for spotting suspects before she could finger them.

  Tov might look rough, his time in service for the Thlibian army giving him a fierce demeanor, but he’d always made her feel safe. The short, military-cut brown hair and black-and-gray tattoos running up his arms completed the package that was marked dangerous. With a capital D.

  About two years ago, she was attacked on the way back to her domicile—and if she hadn’t had her security com on her, things would have been a lot worse.

  But she’d been lucky, and after clicking the emergency button Tov had been there in less than three minutes. He’d beaten the guy within an inch of his life, marked him with nanos and sent him off station in an escape pod. It might sound brutal, but he said that was the only way to keep men like that from doing terrible things to others just because they could. If he was caught again, the punishment would be severe.

  Since then, he’d walked her back to her quarters after every shift. Which was great, but awkward. She’d had only one boyfriend before—they’d gone out several times before a disastrous attempt at sex. But otherwise she hadn’t really had the opportunity to date, and with most of the males she met on the station, who would want to? But the bottom line was that she didn’t really know how to handle herself around men. She was always sticking her boot in her mouth, and at those times Tov would roar with good-natured laughter at her.

  Except for the occasional moments when he got quiet. When she swore she could see a burning hunger in his eyes.

  Stop imagining, Callie. He would never look twice at you.

  She sighed, replacing another wire. She’d seen the kind of women who chased him. Hot. Sexy. Rich. They were either the wives or daughters of the merchants or diplomats who had come to trade on the station, and none of them would be caught dead with a screwdriver. And none of them were elves, which was a decided advantage in this part of the universe. Elves were not well liked since the empire had collapsed.

  Dammit.

  She nicked her finger as she finished splicing the old wire with a new one. She sucked the tiny cut into her mouth and crawled partway back out to see if it worked.

  Yes! The monitors were all back on. She grabbed her tools and put them back in the bag.

  But a swift movement caught her eye. Tov was running across the floor of the purple zone, purpose in every single stride.

  Investigation mode.

  She’d made up her own terms for his different modes of operation over years of watching him. There was also Pursuit mode, Takedown mode, and Complete Badass mode, which she’d seen only twice. The unleashed power and speed of that mode was, quite literally, the stuff of legend. Once he took down ten Vorkians without even breaking a sweat—when he was finished, there were tentacles everywhere.

  She knew she needed to get over her obsession with him. There was no way that tall, dark, and outrageously good-looking cyborg from Thlibo would even consider someone like her—an awkward, orphaned elf with a tendency toward gothic fashion and a career as unfeminine as fixing broken mechanics. Even if she was damn good with a screwdriver.

  She followed him across the monitors to see a line of men at the opposite end of the purple zone, their weapons aimed at one of the storage rooms. Flipping to the monitor with a view of the inside of the storage room, she could clearly see six Gravelins inside, and an enormous device.

  Surely it couldn’t be…

  Flipping the view back to the outside, she saw that Tov’s hands had become fists, and even on the crappy monitors she could see that his eyes were darkening.

  Holy shit.

  Complete Badass mode.

  She hadn’t expected to see that today. But from the look of that device, she thought they might need it.

  Chapter Three

  Tovian

  Fire from the Gravelins had died off for a moment as they tried to make a plan of escape. But they began to fire their weapons again when they saw Tov and Exian advancing, forcing them to return fire. Two Gravelins fell, but the rest retreated and he and Exian crossed the large space almost instantly. He traded one blaster for a knife as they approached the others. Several backed up when he entered the storage room, their slitted eyes narrowing, their tongues flicking outward.

  Tov saw two of his men dead on the floor of the room and his vision blurred with rage. He finished the Gravelin on the floor as he stepped over it, hitting it right between the eyes. Then one rushed him from the right, kicking his blaster and grabbing his right hand, forcing him to drop the knife. He grabbed its foot and pushed it back into the wall, but it did a strange hop-kick with its other foot, kicking him back and jumping at him, trying to bite his face.

  Tov blocked it and its teeth closed around his cybernetic arm, then turned around threw the Gravelin into the box holding the bomb. He grabbed his sword and skewered it through.

  The other men were all fighting their own Gravelins, and he saw one who had been bitten. He thrust his sword through it. He reached down, picked up his blaster from the floor, and shot the last Gravelin who was trying to run out the door.

  “Don’t kill them all!” Exian shouted, finishing the one he’d been fighting.

  Tov grunted and grabbed one in a headlock as Exian shot the others.

  Exian was instantly in his face. “Where is it?”

  “Where is what?” Tov asked, trying to hang on to the Gravelin as it hissed and flicked its tongue, trying to bite Exian.

  “The bomb! This is just the case.” Exian smacked the Gravelin in the head with his blaster. “Tell me now and I might let you live.”

  The Gravelin babbled in its own incomprehensible language, but when Exian pointed the blaster, it began gesturing out into the bay.

  Tov cuffed it and it led them toward one of the Flouriant’s own ships.

  “What if there are more aboard?” Exian asked.

  Tov glanced at his watch. “We’ve got three minutes before I have to hit the evac.”

  Exian sent him a
pointed look, and Tov turned back to one of his newer recruits. “If we don’t come out of that ship, you run and set the fifteen-minute evac by the door. Got it?”

  The recruit nodded, and Tov and Exian headed for the ship, tugging the Gravelin along between them.

  The others followed close behind.

  When they boarded the second ship, it was empty. Except for an enormous bomb sitting in the docking bay.

  Exian went straight to it, unlocked the wiring and whistled. Then he went to the opposite side of the device and unlocked a second panel.

  “Well?” Tov asked impatiently.

  “This is Ardak tech. Extremely sophisticated. If we try to disarm it, it detonates. If we try to move it…”

  “It explodes. I got it. Fuck!”

  Exian came back around and shot the Gravelin between the eyes. “I’m sorry, Tov, but this station is going to explode in seventeen minutes.”

  Tov nodded once. “I guess this means I’m fired.”

  Exian barked a laugh. “Hell, we’re all fired.”

  He turned to his men, who had been slowly filling the bay of the smaller ship, watching the device count down. It was now at sixteen minutes. “Get your asses out of here. As many to a shuttle as can fit. We’re evacuating to Lethden.”

  They all nodded and piled out of the room, sprinting in various directions.

  Tov strode to the wall and flipped on the emergency sirens and typed a message that would go to every monitor on the station, telling everyone to evacuate. He set the countdown to ten minutes—ensuring most of them would make it.

  Then he beeped Rilian. “Sorry, man. There’s no disarming it.”

  “Fuck. That’s what I thought. Whatever you do, get yourself out of here. Don’t die for this hunk of floating metal.” He paused. “Are you going for her?”