Total pages in book: 58
Estimated words: 55375 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 277(@200wpm)___ 222(@250wpm)___ 185(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 55375 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 277(@200wpm)___ 222(@250wpm)___ 185(@300wpm)
He led her through a maze of metal corridors until they came to a control room filled with computers—the old-fashioned kind with solid screens instead of air-interfaces. It was surprisingly clean with just a thin layer of dust on the surfaces. Clearly the air circulation and cleaning protocols were still working.
Corinne sat at one of the monitors and began typing…but she came up against a password screen almost at once.
“Can you get past this?” she asked, looking up at the big Cyborg. “I have no idea what they might have used as their password.”
“Sure. Here.” K-lx made a fist with his right hand and a metal spike extended from the middle knuckle. He plugged the spike into a spot on the keyboard and the password screen dissolved.
“Welcome, Dr. Jippy,” a feminine voice purred. “Your signature is recognized—how may I help you?”
“Oh—how did you do that?” Corinne exclaimed.
K-lx winked.
“I stored some of the head Tolleg’s information when he wasn’t looking. I figured it might come in handy someday.” He shrugged. “Just didn’t expect that someday would be centuries in the future.”
“Well I’m glad you did it.” Corinne began to type. “I’m going to look up your specs and see what I can find out.”
“While you do that, I’ll be looking for star charts and maps,” K-lx rumbled. He was already heading for a computer at the other end of the room. “Just in case we’re leaving the station for good,” he added.
Corinne hadn’t really made up her mind about that. There were heavy penalties for defaulting on a contract with the Company. If they caught her defecting, she could be jailed indefinitely or even put on trial for treason to the Company and sentenced to death. But she didn’t like the idea of going back to a place where Silas Drex was in charge. He already thought he had the right to decommission K-lx and cut him up for research.
What Corinne wanted to do was find evidence that the big Cyborg was worth more alive than dead. She also needed to find more information about keeping him from going Rogue. She had studied the manual she’d found online from front to back by now, but unfortunately, the end of it had turned out to be missing. So there were definitely some gaps in her knowledge.
It didn’t take her long to pull up the specs on K-lix’s model—which was the first one they had ever created, apparently. He was, as she had suspected, unique. He apparently had some kind of tragedy in his past and had volunteered to be the first Kindred Cyborg.
There were no details, but Corinne could read between the lines. He had lost his mate, Cynthia, and hadn’t wanted to go on. He had welcomed the memory wipe, at least according to his files, but the Tolleg surgeon who designed his Cybertronics had noted that such tragic memories could be difficult to permanently wipe forever.
It is recommended that K-L1X should be paired with a single, unattached female as his Handler, Dr. Jippy had written in his file. That way if traumatic memories come forward and pose the threat of going Rogue, she can—as a last resort—Bond with him to stabilize his mental and emotional state.
Bond with him? Corinne frowned. What did that mean? She’d heard K-lx talking about a “Soul-Bond” that the Kindred shared with their chosen mates once or twice, but he had never really explained what it was, except to say it was a little like their Neural Link.
She read further into the file and found some other interesting information. There had been some concern that traveling by Folding Space might damage a new Cyborg in some way. That was why K-lx had been put into a Stasis tube for his journey to a distant planet. He’d been on his way to the Handler who had been chosen for him when an asteroid hit his ship. Since the rest of the crew were killed and the Stasis tube was never found, he had been presumed dead—a casualty of the crash.
So that’s how he came to be drifting around not far from the station, she thought. It was amazing his tube hadn’t collided with anything else. He had drifted from the site of the crash—which was on the outer orbit of Mars—all the way to the rings of Saturn. It really was remarkable.
She learned a few other things too, but she was still mystified about “Bonding” which appeared to be the best way to keep him from going Rogue. According to the Tolleg surgeon’s notes, it was foolproof because—once tied to a female mate—a Kindred warrior was much more stable and secure.
But we’re already Linked, she thought. How much closer can we be?
She would just have to figure it out, Corinne decided. And then she would need to Bond with the big Cyborg. Once she did that, she could prove that he was completely safe from ever going Rogue and Silas couldn’t claim that leaving K-lx functional was a safety issue.