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)
After losing her friend—and her career—Dr. Corinne Virelle has been demoted to scrubbing floors on the deep-space station she once helped run. But when a Rogue Cyborg awakens in a violent fury, she’s the only one who can calm him… by Linking to him in the most intimate, forbidden way. Now, she belongs to him—body, mind, and soul.
K-lx isn’t just any cyborg. He’s the first of his kind—an alpha male hybrid of alien tech and Kindred DNA, programmed for war and wired for obsession. The moment he hears Corinne’s voice, something primal awakens inside possessiveness, desire… hunger. He doesn’t remember his past, but he knows one thing—she is his future. And no force in the galaxy will keep him from claiming her.
But falling for a Rogue Cyborg breaks every rule. Their bond is illegal, dangerous… and unstoppable. Especially when touching her is the only thing that keeps him sane—and keeping him sane may be the only thing that keeps her alive.
If you love possessive alien heroes, forbidden fated mates, protective cyborgs, forced proximity, curvy heroines, steamy sci-fi romance, and spicy Beauty and the Beast retellings with a dark twist… Linked to the Rogue Cyborg is your next obsession
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
1
CORINNE
The Rogue Alert came in the middle of the night but Dr. Corinne Virelle was still up. She hadn’t been able to sleep well for the past six months—ever since her demotion.
She was watching multiple screens displaying the science station—most of it was underground since the terraforming efforts had been halted due to lack of Company funding. Supposedly she was supervising the flock of cleaner-bots that were swarming over the station while most people slept. But it was a job the lowest AI could do—an insult to her intelligence. She had two advanced degrees in Robotics and Cyber-biology specializing in cybernetic organisms.
Yet the cleaning station was where she was—the place she’d been relegated to when C-17 had gone berserk and killed his Handler.
Corinne tried to push the bad memory away. The Handler had been Isla—her protégé and one of the few female scientists aboard the station. Her death left a hole both in the Cybernetics Division of the Company, and in Corinne’s heart. She had mentored the other woman for years and had been proud to see her rise to the position of Cyborg-Handler.
Cyborgs were necessary for the protection of the far-flung colonies the Company financed to expand scientific exploration…but they were also dangerously unpredictable and sometimes deadly. It was their human DNA that made them so difficult to deal with.
Some scientists wanted to return to pure robotics for deep-space protection, but since the AI uprising of the early 2030s back on Old Earth, that had been forbidden. By law, any free-ranging robotic organism had to have a biological component to balance its mechanical side. It was thought that the emotional element would temper the pure logic of the mechanism. But all too often, it was emotion that caused a Cyborg to go Rogue.
It was Corinne’s firm belief that this was why female Handlers were better than male Handlers. When it came to dealing with big emotions, women were simply better at it than men. And since Cyborgs were invariably male, they often responded to a woman’s touch. It was one reason she had mentored Isla and tried to bring other women scientists into the Cybernetics Division of the Company.
But all her work was being destroyed now. The new Head of the Cybernetics Division was trying to get around the Cyborgs’ emotions instead of dealing with them head-on. The last Corinne had heard, he was advocating for growing the biological components in flesh tanks and artificial wombs instead of using wounded and dying veterans and adding mechanical components, which was the usual practice.
Currently half of the station’s defense force was guarded by these soulless monsters but they were too stupid to comprehend orders half the time. At least, that was what Dr. Jose Herrera, one of her few remaining contacts in the Division, told her.
It was Jose who was calling her now.
“Rogue Alert! Rogue Alert!” His voice sounded panicked over her intercom. “Dr. Virelle, please respond!”
She leaned forward and waved a hand over the interface to allow his holo-image to form. He looked as panicked as he sounded—his thinning hair was sticking up like he’d been running his fingers through it and his eyes were wide under the thick oculars he wore.
“Corinne, can you hear me?” he demanded.
“Loud and clear,” she assured him. “What’s wrong? Which Unit went Rogue? Is it C-17 again?”
The killer Cyborg was much too expensive to be scrapped—even though it had “caused a loss of human life” as the Company euphemistically put it. But once a Cyborg went Rogue, it was twice as likely to happen again. Even with reprogramming, memory wipes, and reconditioning, it simply wasn’t safe. Not that the Company would listen to any kind of reason on the subject—they weren’t going to retire an asset they’d poured millions of credits into just because it had killed a human or two.
But to her surprise, Jose shook his head.
“No, it’s a new Unit—or rather, an old one.”
“Explain.” Corinne frowned and pushed a sheaf of wavy, reddish-brown hair behind one ear.
“The exploration team found a Stasis tube on a crashed ship, drifting in from the Outer Rings,” Jose explained. They brought it in because the organism inside was still alive. We believe it’s one of the old K-units—the ones that used Kindred warriors as the biological components for their Cyborgs.”
Corinne frowned.
“That would have to be hundreds of years old. The Kindred protected Earth back before the AI Uprising.”
“Exactly. And those things were built like tanks because the Kindred were so much bigger than humans. The team thought it would have valuable knowledge stored in its memory unit but when they opened the Stasis tube, it went berserk. Look!”
Jose pointed the com-unit he was using at the main lab and Corinne sucked in her breath.
Past the glass barrier that enclosed the lab, an absolutely huge Cyborg was going berserk. His mechanical arms were working as he grabbed equipment that would be much too heavy for a human or even another Cyborg to lift and threw it over his head. Already there was a spiderweb of cracks in the supposedly unbreakable safety glass—she wondered how much longer it could hold out.