Double Down (The Drift Book 1) Read online

  Double Down

  Susan Hayes

  Contents

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  DEDICATION

  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

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  When it comes to love, sometimes the best bet is to double down.

  Kit and Luke Armas are cyborgs created for one purpose, battle. Now that the war is over, they must fight to carve out a place for themselves in a universe they were intended to die for but never be a part of.

  Cargo pilot Zura Watson came to the edge of civilized space to start over. The Drift is a haven for the hunted, the lost, and those seeking second chances. It was also the last place in the cosmos Zura expected to find love.

  When the shadows of the past threaten to eclipse this trio’s future, they’ll have to fight for their chance at love and the life they’ve always dreamed of.

  DOUBLE DOWN

  SUSAN HAYES

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  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental. It is fiction so facts and events may not be accurate except to the current world the book takes place in.

  Copyright© 2016 Susan Hayes

  Double Down (Book #1 of the Drift Series)

  First E-book Publication: July 2016

  Kindle Edition

  Cover Design: Melody Simmons ~ ebookindiecovers.com

  Editor: Rebecca Cartee ~ Editing by Rebecca

  Published by: Black Scroll Publications

  ISBN:978-0-9950950-5-2

  DEDICATION

  For my parents, Brian and Elizabeth Hayes. I wouldn’t be here without your love and constant support. For my best friend in the whole world, Karen, who is always there to help me when my muse pulls a vanishing act.

  This book is also dedicated to my readers. You are all simply amazing. Thank you for reading my stories and joining me on my next adventure.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks to my “J-Team” Julie, Jolanda, and Jenn. I love you ladies; thank you for all your help and support.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Stay the hell out of my bar and away from my staff, or a broken nose will be the least of your problems, asshole.” Kit Armas snarled as he tossed yet another drunken idiot out the front doors of his establishment. He watched in silence as the man stumbled away, slurring incoherent threats and curses in a mixture of languages, including Terran, the most common language on Earth, and broken Galactic Standard.

  “It’s going to be one of those nights, isn’t it?” Cyn asked, her tone downright chipper. The tall, rangy brunette had materialized at his side without warning, which was something he knew she did solely to piss him off. She was the only person in the world who could move silently enough to sneak up on him, and she took an unholy joy in doing so.

  “It looks that way,” Kit agreed as he wiped the latest ejectee’s blood from his knuckles with a bar rag.

  Cynder Armas was his batch sister and fellow cyborg, as well as his former lieutenant, and now his business partner. Together with his brother, Luke, they owned and ran the Nova Club, which was part fight club, part gambling den, and full-time bar. Kit handled security, Luke managed the bar and kitchen, while Cyn oversaw the staff and handled the finances. Tonight, though, it was all hands on deck, which meant Cyn got to do what she loved most: bust heads. Cynder’s primary purpose was stealth and infiltration, not combat, but she loved a good fight. No amount of tinkering had been able to remove that glitch in her programming, and the corporation lab-techs had certainly tried.

  “Dibs on the next idiot. I’ve been stuck in the office doing the books for days; I need some play time,” she said, cracking her knuckles for emphasis.

  “Next one is all yours.”

  She cheered softly, and Kit rolled his eyes at her.

  “You don’t have to look so pleased about it, you lunatic.”

  She flashed him a grin that had sent lesser men running for cover. “It’s fight night, the booze is flowing, we’ve got a full house, and tonight I’m getting paid to kick ass and take names. This is like Christmas morning for me. At least it would be if you hadn’t jumped that guy before I could.”

  He shrugged. “He went after Teenie when she turned him down for the tenth time. The bastard had it coming, and you weren’t there. I was. Besides, the last time I checked, dealing with the rowdies was my job description, not yours.”

  Cyn scoffed. “We all pitch in for each other, and you know it, especially on a night like tonight. Granted, you probably needed to blow off steam even more than I did. You’ve been in a foul mood for a week now.”

  “Have not,” he retorted.

  “Yep, you have. For oh about…” She made a show of checking her watch. “Seven days, nine hours, and forty minutes. Funny thing, that’s the same amount of time that a certain someone’s been away on a cargo run.”

  Kit frowned at Cyn and raised a finger as he ticked off each of his points. “One. I’m not in a foul mood. Two, even if I were, that has nothing to do with anyone’s absence. Three. I have no idea who you’re referring to. Four. I’m not in a foul fraxxing mood.”

  She laughed and snapped off a salute. “Whatever you say, Major.”

  “Cut that out. I’m not your Major anymore. What I am is the majority shareholder in this fraxxing madhouse we call a club, so quit being a pain in my ass and get back to work.”

  Cyn stuck out her tongue at him before vanishing back into the bar with the same uncanny speed and stealth with which she had appeared. He had known her his entire life, and he would never get used to the way she did that.

  Kit didn’t linger at the door himself. Cyn was right; the place was packed tonight, which meant he needed to head inside. It was time to get back to work.

  The Nova Club wasn’t unique in the Drift. There were dozens of bars, casinos, gambling dens, and pleasure houses scattered across the motley collection of stations and platforms that drifted on the far edge of civilized space, catering to the mining corporations and those who worked for them.

  Beyond the Drift was wild space and an asteroid belt full of ore-rich rocks. While they got the occasional exploration vessel passing through, most of the traffic out here was tied to mining. Massive processing ships carried the ore in from the working areas, offloading the refined product onto waiting freighters that shipped it back to civilization. Hundreds of mining vessels worked the asteroid belt, their crews spending months out in deep space before returning. All those crews needed a place to blow off steam and spend their pay, and that’s why the Drift had more bars and recreational businesses than it did corporate offices and standard shops.

  If there was a way to profit from pleasure, then the corporations had it covered.

  The club belonged to Kit and his batch siblings, but they paid a premium to the Astek Mining Corp for the right to run their club. Everything from the space leased, to the liquor and pharma licenses required payments that went straight into Astek’s bank accounts. If it weren’t for the years of back pay they had b
een granted when they were finally released from their military contracts, they would never have been able to afford it.

  He, Luke, and Cyn were all cyborgs. They hadn’t been born, they’d been designed in a lab, grown in maturation tanks, and come to consciousness as adults with a barcode printed on their wrist. They weren’t considered people; they were granted no rights or even an identity apart from their alphabetically assigned first names. Cyborgs were nothing more than high-priced commodities, designed to fight in a war that had raged across the starscape for years.

  Fifteen years ago, the largest corporations in the galaxy, most of them human-owned, had been at war with each other, fighting for dominance over resources and profits. To win, they needed cannon fodder, but the death tolls were too high for any but the most desperate men to sign up to fight. Desperate men make poor soldiers, so the corporations started making cyborgs to fight their battles for them. Soon, there were no paid soldiers fighting in the Resource Wars at all. There were only the corporations’ creations, each one designed to be a perfect soldier. With bodies full of tech, bloodstreams laden with regenerating medi-bots, and minds laden with behavioral programming, cyborgs were a neat, tidy solution to a messy war.

  Until the war ended.

  Kit and his brethren had fought in the Resource Wars for more than ten years. By the time the fighting was over and the winners had divvied up the spoils, there weren’t many of his kind left alive. The corporations had plans to ‘humanely decommission’ their remaining soldiers, but those plans went to hell when the cyborgs finally revealed their most carefully guarded secret. The ones left alive had long since overcome their programming. They had free will, and they weren’t interested in being put down like stray dogs.

  In the end, the public outcry had been enough to force the corporations that created them to relinquish ownership. The cyborgs were all freed, their contracts terminated, and each veteran was granted an impressive amount of back pay for all their years of service. By then, there were only three surviving members of Kit’s original batch. Luke, Cynder, and himself. They pooled their money and created the Nova Club.

  Kit went back inside and began patrolling the club again, looking for trouble in any of its many forms. As he walked, his thoughts kept straying back to the challenges that had brought them out to the Drift. It had taken the collective power of a number of planetary governments to force the corporations to release their creations, but not even that was enough to make people want or accept the cyborgs. It was one thing to rally behind a cause when it didn’t affect them, but when Kit and his brethren tried to be part of the civilized world, acceptance proved hard to come by.

  Things were easier out here in the Drift, but even so, there were biases to be overcome. Nearly every race and species had an innate distrust of anyone or anything that was different, and cyborgs were something none of the other races were familiar with. Kit and his brethren might look human, but there was enough tech and steel inside his body to ensure there would always be those who thought of them as nothing more than machines. People like Andrea Rankan—the woman who had stomped on his heart.

  “Will you quit glowering at everyone? You’re putting the customers off their drinks.”

  Kit’s train of thought was derailed by his brother’s voice. His patrolling had brought him around to Luke’s domain, the bar. He glanced over to the far side of the gleaming chrome countertop to where Luke was standing. The smile on his brother’s face didn’t quite reach his eyes. Instead, his lips were pursed, and his arms were crossed over his chest, almost completely hiding the blue and silver bar logo emblazoned on his shirt.

  “You okay?” Luke asked over their internal comm channel.

  “Just thinking,” Kit answered aloud. He was in no mood to have his brother’s voice in his head.

  Luke snagged a bottle from behind him and poured two glasses of something clear that bubbled and smoked as it hit the ice at the bottom of the glass. “I’m not even going to ask who you were thinking about. I know it was Andrea, again.”

  “What gave it away?”

  “The thunderous look on your face. You need to let it go, Kit. She was a cold-hearted bitch wrapped up in a pretty package. There are plenty of other stars in the sky. I wish you’d pick a new one to orbit around.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “I can already hear the ‘but’ on the end of that sentence. She screwed us both over, remember? I was there, too. We got burned, but I’m not going to let that stop me from trying again.”

  Kit eyed the freshly poured drink and decided a change of topic was in order. “What the fraxx is that?

  Luke pushed one of the glasses toward him. “This is something new.”

  “Why is it bubbling?” He started to reach for the glass and then froze as the drink slowly changed colors, first to orange, then red. “I’m not drinking that.”

  Luke laughed. “Relax, it’s just a chemical reaction with the ice. If you don’t try it, Zura will be very disappointed. She brought this in especially for us.”

  “There isn’t a snowball’s chance in a supernova that I’m going to drink—“ He stopped as the rest of what Luke had said sunk in. “Wait, the Sun Sprite is back already? When? Where is she?”

  Zura Watson was the owner and pilot of one of the many freighters that came and went from the Drift. She first appeared at the club six months or so ago, always alone and never saying more than a few words. At first, all she had been was another customer, albeit one of the more pleasant ones. She paid her tab, stayed quiet, and never started trouble. The few times trouble had come looking for her, she had made short work of the ones giving her grief. It didn’t take long for word to spread that manhandling the Sun Sprite’s pilot was a bad idea unless you had a thing for pain and visits to the medical center.

  He hadn’t known much about her in the beginning, apart from the fact she kept to herself and always paid her tab. He and Luke had been too busy running the bar and dealing with the fallout of the implosion of their relationship with Andrea to notice much of anything or anyone. That’s what he told himself, anyway. Luke’s theory was less complimentary and involved Kit having his head up his ass while stubbornly refusing to see what was right in front of him.

  All that had changed when the outbreak hit. A lethal virus tore through the Drift, infecting hundreds. Human, Jeskyran, even the normally unstoppable Torskis proved to be vulnerable to the infection. The medi-bots all cyborgs carried in their bloodstream had protected Kit and his brethren, but they’d been some of the lucky few.

  Within days, the medical staff was overwhelmed. Then, the emergence of a cosmic storm had added to the crisis. The vaccine they needed was waiting for them light-years away, but the storm made space travel insanely dangerous. Only one pilot volunteered to go: Zura Watson.

  She made the run and returned to the Drift with all the vaccine they needed, saving countless lives. Both she and her ship paid the price, though. The Sun Sprite’s shield generators were burned out, and her engines had been pushed past their breaking point. As for Zura, flying through the storm had exposed her to dangerous levels of radiation, leaving her so weak, she had barely managed to dock before falling unconscious for days.

  Some of the lives Zura had saved belonged to the staff of the Nova. As far as Kit and Luke were concerned, offering her a place to crash while she recovered and her ship was repaired was the least they could do. It had turned out to be the best decision they could have made, because it gave them a chance to get to know her better. She was so much more than either of them had ever imagined.

  Even weakened and ill, she had found reasons to joke, and laughter had become a common sound to hear coming out of her room whenever she had a visitor. At first, not many had come by, but as the club staff got to know her, they spent more time there, bringing her meals, games, and bits of gossip to help keep her from getting bored.

  Both he and Luke had started spending more and more time in her company, attracted by her wit and goo
d humor as much as her beauty. She was a kind soul wrapped around a core of steel, and as she had slowly recovered, the three of them had become good friends.

  Eight days ago. Zura had left on her first run since she had been cleared for flight duty, and Kit had missed her more than he cared to admit.

  His brother snickered. “Yeah, she’s back. She showed up here about ten minutes ago. She came by to say hello while you were making your rounds and then went looking for a free table. You feel like taking a few minutes off your constant patrolling to say hi?”

  “You could have opened with that information and skipped the lecture about Andrea, you know. Hell, you could have sent me a comm message telling me she was here when she arrived.”

  “And where would be the fun in that? Besides, you needed the reminder. We’ve talked about this; it’s time to move on. Bring your drink and follow me. Last time I saw her, she was headed for the VIP section.”

  “You’re an asshole,” he muttered, but he picked up his glass as his brother vaulted the bar to join him.

  “We’re genetically identical, which means you’re one too.” He picked up the bottle and his glass off the bar. “Come on, asshole, let’s go find our favorite pilot.”

  Kit’s mood lightened at the news that Zura was back. She insisted on flying her ship solo, which was cost-effective, but risky. If anything went wrong, she was on her own. Her job took her to some of the roughest places in the sector, and it bothered him that there was no one watching her back.

  He and Luke were more than brothers, they were twins. They had been designed to work as a command team, trained to think and act as one. They were even linked to each other via internal comms, able to communicate and monitor the other’s bio-signs. Kit had never been truly alone in his life, and as much as that irritated him sometimes, he couldn’t imagine what it would be like to face life the way Zura did, completely on her own, with no one she could rely on.