Read Drifter's War for Free Online Page B

oval, lined with some sort of light green spongy material, and made sounds when you touched it.
    Pik thought it was some sort of zero-G music room, where the builders had composed music by bouncing off the walls, but Cap had disagreed. He said the room was a computer terminal where sound stood in for numbers and the aliens had performed sophisticated calculations.
    Cy Borg didn't care. He was lonely, bored, and more than a little pissed. If cyborgs can be pissed, which Cy felt sure they could, since borgs feel things the same way other humans do. He propelled himself toward a wall, heard a B flat, and bounced off.
    His anger stemmed from the fact that Cap, Melissa, Pik, and Della had departed for Pylax without him. Someone had to stay aboard the drifter, and since Cy knew the most about the drifter's inner workings he was elected. They needed him aboard the drifter. That's what they said anyway.
    But Cy knew better. He knew what they really thought. They were afraid that he'd get them all in trouble. They knew his history, how he'd gambled his organs away, until only his brain was left. And they'd been present when representatives of the gamblers' guild had come after him for unpaid debts. Debts that had landed Pik and Melissa in jail.
    So he had a problem with gambling? So what? Cap was a world-champion drunk, Pik was wanted for murder, and Della was little more than a hired killer. Who were they to tell him what to do?
    "No," Cy concluded out loud, "my body may be different… but my emotions are the same. And I'm pissed."
    So saying, the cyborg spun in midair and headed for the drifter's control room. He'd promised not to experiment with the ship's controls while the rest of them were gone but it wouldn't hurt to look. Besides, there wasn't anything else to do, and why should they have all the fun?
    Cy aimed his globular body toward the nearest hatch and zoomed through the passageway beyond. He extruded both vid pickups and added more speed. Certain pleasures were lost to him, sex being the most noticeable, but others had taken their place.
    And first and foremost among those pleasures was three-dimensional movement. Thanks to a small antigrav unit, and jets of compressed air, Cy could move in ways that most people never dreamed of. Zero G is one thing, but ah, freedom within gravity… that's something else.
    And thanks to his metal casing and internal oxygen supply, Cy could survive in space without a suit. Yes, there were advantages to being a cyborg, though Cy would have returned to his original body in a second had that been possible.
    Cy shot out of the passageway into a large open space. Dense foliage grew to the right and left. Rain drummed on his metal casing. Unlike humans, and the aliens encountered so far, the builders had equipped their ship with a self-maintaining biosphere. The drifter boasted a desert, grasslands, and a small forest full of double-trunked trees. The artificial gravity was slightly less than Terran norm, and the air was generally more humid than Cy liked, the exceptions being the desert and certain equipment bays.
    The rain turned to mist as Cy left the grasslands and approached the forest. The forest never failed to interest him. There were the strange double-trunked trees for one thing, their puffy foliage growing off perfectly straight limbs, each one a perfect replica of all the others.
    Then there were the paths, dozens of them, that wound in and around the trees and served as highways for a variety of small animals. Cy and his companions had caught and examined some of them. None were real. Like the birds that fluttered between the trees, and the insects that buzzed through the air, the animals were robots. Sophisticated robots, yes, and potentially quite valuable, but mindless things that were more decorative than useful.
    The engineer in Cy ached to take one of them apart but knew he shouldn't. What if there was some sort of sophisticated relationship between them and the ship