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Cyborg Protector: Men of Mettle, #1
Cyborg Protector: Men of Mettle, #1
Cyborg Protector: Men of Mettle, #1
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Cyborg Protector: Men of Mettle, #1

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A duty to protect his sworn enemy…

 

Ten years ago the president's teenage daughter, Penelope Isabella Aaron, had leveled false accusations against Brock Mann and derailed his protection officer career. Much has changed in a decade: "PIA" as he code-named her, has grown up. She's an ambassador about to attend her first Association of Planets conference, and Brock has been transformed into a cyborg.

 

 Now a secret agent with Cyber Operations, he gets called in, not when the going gets tough, but when the going gets impossible. So when he's assigned to go undercover as Penelope's husband and ensure she gets safely to the summit, he balks. But honor won't allow him to shirk his duty, and he agrees to protect the woman he'd sworn to despise.

 

But if a terrorist bombing and a crash landing on a hostile planet aren't bad enough, Brock soon discovers his unexpected growing attraction to his protectee  makes Operation: PIA his most dangerous assignment yet.

 

Cyborg Protector (Men of Mettle 1) was originally titled Stranded with the Cyborg.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherCara Bristol
Release dateAug 7, 2016
ISBN9780996145237
Cyborg Protector: Men of Mettle, #1

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    Book preview

    Cyborg Protector - Cara Bristol

    Cyborg Protector

    Men of Mettle 1

    Cara Bristol

    Cyborg Protector (Men of Mettle 1)

    Copyright © September 2015 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 : 978-0-9961452-3-7

    Editor: Kate Richards

    Copy Editor: Nanette Sipe

    Cover Artist: Sweet ’N Spicy Designs

    Formatting by Wizards in Publishing

    Published in the United States of America

    Cara Bristol

    http://www.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

    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

    Other Titles by Cara Bristol

    About Cara Bristol

    Acknowledgments

    He has a duty to protect his sworn enemy.

    Ten years ago Penelope Isabella Aaron, had leveled false accusations against Brock Mann and derailed his protection officer career. Much has changed in a decade: PIA as he code-named her, has grown up. She’s an ambassador about to attend her first Association of Planets conference, and Brock has been transformed into a cyborg.

    Now a secret agent with Cyber Operations, he gets called in, not when the going gets tough, but when the going gets impossible. So when he’s assigned to go undercover as Penelope’s husband and ensure she gets safely to the summit, he balks at first. But honor won’t allow him to shirk his duty, and he agrees to protect the woman he’d sworn to despise.

    But if a terrorist bombing and a crash landing on a hostile planet aren’t bad enough, Brock soon discovers his unexpected growing attraction to his protectee  makes Operation: PIA his most dangerous assignment yet.

    Chapter One

    What was so urgent it couldn’t wait until I got back from Darius 4? Brock flung himself into the wide sensa-chair, which conformed to the angles and lines of his body to provide optimal support and comfort. He would have preferred an android pleasure worker fit her realistic feminine form around him rather than a piece of furniture—as he’d been about to experience when the Cyber Operations director’s summons had come through. You’re the one who insisted I take respite time.

    Drink? Carter punched a button on his console, a cabinet slid open, and he removed a decanter. After pouring two shots of bronze liqueur, he shoved one across the desk.

    Brock’s internal warning system flashed an alert. What’s the bad news?

    Why do you assume that?

    "Whenever you break out the Cerinian brandy, you’re either trying to butter me up or soften the blow." He eyed the man who’d been his friend since they’d served together in the Terran Central Protection Office thirteen years ago. Carter’s blank expression betrayed nothing, but the brandy sang like a yellow songbird.

    The director knocked back his shot then thumped his chest with his fist. Cerinian brandy went down smooth until the afterburn lit your throat on fire. Or it did to one who was unaltered. Brock swallowed his and felt only slight warmth.

    I have an assignment for you. Carter’s voice was hoarse from the liqueur. The Association of Planets Summit is on Malodonus next week. There’s been a threat against...the Terran ambassador. He hesitated like he expected Brock to short-circuit a computer chip.

    After five years without a day off, Brock had been ordered to take R & R or be reassigned to desk duty. His irritation with the edict had been relieved somewhat when he’d arrived at the Darius 4 pleasure resort and discovered the android sex workers were almost lifelike.

    First Carter told him to go then he recalled him. Brock wouldn’t blow any gaskets, but he was irked. Quit jerking me around. What government official hasn’t received a threat? It’s part of the job. What’s so special about this case? He shifted in the sensa-chair so its fingers could massage his lower spine.

    "According to intel, Lamis-Odg is involved."

    Lamis-Odg had contributed nothing significant or positive toward the advancement of society in thousands of years yet opposed the AOP’s goal to draw the peoples of the galaxy into an alliance. Historically, the backwater planet had been more bluster than bite but, in recent years, had resorted to terrorism to intimidate its adversaries.

    Brock flexed his right hand. How certain is the threat?

    It’s being treated as a level two.

    Level one threats most often represented the rantings of a lunatic who would not act on the threat—or who lacked the means to do so. In a level two, a specific target had been named by a perpetrator who might have the means to carry it out. Level three was considered probable, and level four was imminent.

    Call me when it gets to level four. He didn’t have time to waste playing nursemaid to some prissy ambassador. Let the Central Protection Office handle it. This fell under their jurisdiction.

    Carter spread his hands. I’m told the CPO has intercepted a transmission indicating the ambassador was recently placed on Lamis-Odg’s enemies of the state list.

    So no specific plot has been identified?

    No. The risk was bumped from level one to two because she is an ambassador and other intercepted communiqués suggest Lamis-Odg has become more active.

    So why isn’t the Central Protection Office dealing with it? Guarding government and diplomatic personnel fell into their bailiwick. When he’d been a CPO agent, he’d managed level two and three risks all the time. While a two should be taken seriously, it didn’t require the specialized abilities of the covert Cyber Operations force.

    The ambassador has refused protection.

    Figures. Bureaucrats always thought they knew everything. Why?

    She has a meeting with the Xenian emperor to convince him to send a delegate to the Summit and join the AOP.

    Brock scanned his memory banks for information on the small planet in the Omicron sector. Like Lamis-Odg, Xenia had no interest in joining the AOP. Unlike Lamis-Odg, the Xenians weren’t hostile or violent—they were isolationists and pacifists who shied away from conflict and interplanetary politics.

    Carter continued, She fears showing up with a security detail will send the message there’s something to be wary of.

    Isn’t there? Brock said drily, and then added, If the ambassador has refused security, then I don’t see why it’s our problem.

    I was asked for a favor..

    The bad premonition Brock had gotten when he’d received the summons, and again when Carter had broken out the brandy, grew stronger. Suppose you cut to the chase.

    The ambassador is Mikala Aaron’s daughter.

    Sonofabitch. Pia?

    Carter nodded.

    Pia. Short for Penelope Isabella Aaron, or, as Brock had code-named his former protectee, Pain in the Ass. Every member of the Terran First Family had a designated CPO agent assigned to him or her. Most of them understood the agents were there for their benefit, to protect them from possible threats. Not Pia.

    The teenager had done her damnedest to make his work life a living hell. He couldn’t count the number of times he’d caught the hellion attempting to sneak out of the executive residence unescorted. Nor had he appreciated her practical jokes and dirty tricks. When her attempts to dodge him had failed, she’d lodged false charges of sexual misconduct.

    Shot at numerous times during his career, Brock had been seriously wounded twice and almost fatally once. Pia had been his waterloo—or would have been if Mikala Aaron, aware of her daughter’s machinations, hadn’t stepped in.

    Brock folded his arms across his chest. It doesn’t have to be me. Get somebody else.

    President Aaron has requested you.

    "Former President Aaron. She’s a civilian now. And we don’t report to the president anyway."

    Carter sighed. I could order you to do it.

    As Cy-Ops director, Carter was Brock’s superior—technically. But the organization officially did not exist, and commanding a band of rogues who operated outside the law required finesse, rather than blunt orders. You wouldn’t dare, Brock said.

    Carter inhaled, held his breath for a moment, and then exhaled. No. I’m asking you to do it—as a favor to me.

    Favors, like shit, rolled downhill.

    Don’t do this to me. The inevitable settle in like the weight of tons of bricks. He owed Carter his life. If not for the director, Brock would have died in a military hospital or been left a shell of man, a chunk of his brain gone, an arm and two legs missing. Carter’s secret force had whisked him from the intensive care unit to a clandestine cybermed installation.

    Brock had been in no condition to consent to the treatment he’d been subjected to, but if he had been aware, he wouldn’t have hesitated. He wanted to live, but not half alive. Cybermed docs had injected him with nanocytes, tiny robotic cells, and implanted a microcomputer in his brain to control them. He’d been fitted with prosthetic limbs. Under the influence of the biomimetic particles, he’d regenerated human muscle, tendon, and skin. Excruciatingly painfully, but it had happened. They’d kept him unconscious for most of it.

    When he’d awakened, his body—and, to some degree, his mind—had been rebuilt. He’d been transformed into a bigger, stronger, more resilient Brock. And then Carter had recruited him as a cyberoperative in his clandestine military force.

    Cyber Operations didn’t respond when the going got tough, Cy-Ops responded when the going got impossible. When your only choice was to kiss your ass good-bye, that’s when Cy-Ops moved in.

    Calling a cyberoperative to escort an ambassador to a summit meeting? A ridiculous waste of manpower. Pia as protectee? Impossible. Maybe Cy-Ops’s involvement made sense in a twisted way. Nothing could be more impossible than this assignment.

    A lot has changed in ten years. Penelope is different now, Carter said.

    Brock doubted that. Does she know about me? What happened? What I am?

    That you’re a cyborg? Of course not. She hasn’t been told anything about the program or even that you’re the one who’s been assigned to her.

    Yeah, spring it on her. That will go over well. He could envision the tantrum, and, after she calmed down, the scheme she would devise to circumvent the decision. The last time he’d seen her, she’d been emerging from his quarters half-dressed, a triumphant smile tilting her lips. Shortly thereafter, two fellow agents had come to arrest him.

    President Aaron had exonerated him and written him a personal letter of apology for her daughter’s actions, the transcripts from the investigation had been sealed, and he’d been offered reassignment. But he’d feared the taint of rumor would remain, and he’d had enough anyway. He’d taken a position with an anti-terrorist investigative organization. His unit got attacked; his fellow operatives had died, and he’d been near fatally injured. Carter, who’d been working with Cy-Ops all along, had swooped in and saved his ass, had him transported to Cybermed. Brock was alive, fully functioning, and for that he would be forever grateful, but he still couldn’t get over what he had lost: his humanness. He laughed, he fucked, he bled, but he was still part machine. He often couldn’t tell whether his human brain operated his body, or the tiny computer implanted between the lobes.

    "I’m not saying I’ll do it, but, hypothetically, if I had a computer meltdown and agreed, what would be my cover story? I couldn’t tag along as her bodyguard because that would unsettle the Xenians."

    Carter poured two more shot of Cerinian brandy, shoved one across the desk, and downed his. You’d accompany Ambassador Aaron as her husband.

    Oh, hell no!

    * * * *

    Oh, hell no! Penelope glared at her mother. A husband? Are you crazy?

    Not a real husband, said Mikala. A bodyguard.

    Penelope shook her head. "The Xenians are wary as it is. If they think I need a bodyguard, it will derail any chance of building an alliance. That’s why I rejected the Central Protection Office detail."

    You’ve been listed by Lamis-Odg.

    Who don’t they want to kill? Penelope dismissed the threat with a snort. They’re a small planet of crackpots halfway across the galaxy. Anyone who disagrees with anything they believe is targeted.

    They can’t be ignored, Penelope. Their support is growing. They’ve been able to recruit the disgruntled and mentally unbalanced from many different planets, train them, and send them home. They’re like that malignancy eradicated in the 23rd century.

    Cancer?

    "Yes, like cancer. They invade the host cell and turn it against

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