Deep Space (Stranded in the Stars Book 3)

by Naomi Lucas

“If you change your mind–if you falter–if you so much as deviate from the mission in any way that directly impedes the goal–you will be labeled a traitor to the Earthian Council.”

“If that isn’t warning enough, know that you will be brought in by the Council, dead or alive. If you should live, it will be an arduous life on a prison planet.” The lieutenant general rubbed his mouth and admitted, “To be blunt, your arm has an embedded tracker in it.”

I guess they’ll allow me to speak now. “Hello, Captain Reina. I am Atlas, your Automated Transport and Logistical Aid System.”

“It’s beautiful.” “Beauty is often a low requirement when it comes to functionality. In our line of work, beauty is the only thing that keeps many of us going. It should not be jeopardized but nurtured, sought after, and coveted.”

He was just an intelligence to her, not a man. There could be nothing between them. And very quickly, his frustration came back. His anger that he spent every digital day of his life tamping down, hiding from the overlords that controlled him.

Atlas looked down at his almost-corpse, iced over under a thick layer of glass, and wished his rage were enough to melt it. He had taken a precise shot to the heart, unguarded for mere seconds, but it was enough time for a Trentian berserker to snipe the vital organ.

With a view into the physical world he no longer inhabited, he came back, then reached out to the other Cyborgs. Finally, he made his way back into the Earthian Council’s cybernetic lab where his body was being stored. A body, a promise that hung over his head like a wretched curse; with it, they used and manipulated him into being a sentient intelligence. His databases swarmed by deceit and data that he could do nothing with, he was powerless because his compliance was bought with the promise that he would be brought back to life.

Atlas looked down at his body, the slime of his biological heart removed long ago, and he simmered. Those bastards created me, then enslaved me, and now they send my corpse out to deep space to use me as their insurance that we’ll return. That I’ll return. Because I would never risk the one thing that could bring me back to life.

“You’re not the third candidate for this mission.” His voice went stiff, “You’re the twenty-eighth.” What? The silence that followed was hard to swallow. “They all died?” “Every one of them.”

Then there is the fear of actually losing yourself and that fear brings you back. Only loneliness remains...and your regrets.” “Can you get lost?” “Yes.” “How did you survive it?” she asked. “I survived it?”

“Most people are idiots who do not know that even honorable people can do terrible things. Wearing a badge of honor is just a guise and an excuse to help a man go to bed at night. In our world, logic, rationality, patience, and common sense are the true virtues of our kind.