Cyborg Heart Read online

  Cyborg Heart

  Alien Invasion Romance

  By

  Anna Lewis

  © Copyright 2017 by Anna Lewis - All rights reserved.

  In no way is it legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document in either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited and any storage of this document is not allowed unless with written permission from the publisher. All rights reserved. Respective authors own all copyrights not held by the publisher.

  = Publisher’s Note =

  THANK YOU for downloading this book.

  After the main story, we included 8 bonus full-length novellas and short stories for your reading pleasure. Hoping you’ll like them. 

  Table of Contents

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  Cyborg Heart

  Special Bonus Full Length Stories

  Cosmically Yours

  Mated To Twin Dragon Princes

  Wager of Hearts

  Dragons Blood

  Between Dragons Fire

  Son of an Alien Prince

  Out Of This World - Scifi Menage Romance

  Alien Trinity

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  Cyborg Heart

  Friday morning: Breach plus one hour

  Reilly pressed the cellphone against her ear, the sound of the ringing line seeming so loud, even over the crashing chaos currently tearing her laboratory to scrap. Ring, Ring. Would it hear the phone? Could it? It didn’t seem to have noticed her yet, focused as it was on annihilating her life’s work. Ring, Ring. “Dammit Maksim,” Reilly mouthed, not daring to put any sound into the words lest she was noticed. “Pick up the damn phone!” Ring... The ringing stopped, and even as the wave of cold relief washed over her mind, a voice began speaking on the other end of the line.

  “You have reached the residence of Maksim Sokolov,” said a crisp, professional voice with only the slightest Slavic accent. “Please leave me your name and phone number…” An answering machine. She was listening to Maksim's landline answering machine! It took everything Reilly had not to start swearing. She gripped the phone very tightly, her lips pressed into a hard line as she fumed with anger. What was she going to do now? Maksim had been her only backup plan, but the damned mercenary hadn't answered her call! What kind of Luddite maniac had a landline anyway? BEEP!

  Reilly jumped. She hadn’t realized that Maksim’s pre-recorded voice had stopped speaking. The scrabbling, smashing sounds coming from the far side of the lab ceased, and Reilly held her breath, not daring to speak, sure that the thing out there had heard the phone. But then a moment later, it resumed whatever foul activity it had been focusing on, and the crashing sounds continued. Reilly breathed out a sigh, and then, realizing that the answering machine was still recording, she said, in as loud a whisper as she dared, “Maksim, if you’re hearing this, please pick up. Please. I need your help.” Nothing happened. The answering machine continued recording. Reilly gritted her teeth with frustration and made as if to close the phone, but then she was struck with a horrible thought. What if Maksim called back? Would the thing wrecking her lab hear? She could just silence her phone, but what if—

  There was a loud rattling sound, and a gruff, winded masculine voice said, “Hello?” Reilly blinked. The Slavic accent was much thicker in his voice than usual. Something had his adrenaline up. “Reilly?”

  “Not so loud,” she whispered. “There’s something in the lab with me.”

  Maksim didn’t say anything for a moment, and all Reilly could hear was his heavy breathing in the background, and a strange, arrhythmic tapping sound, like metal against wood. “Some-thing is in the lab with you?”

  “Yes,” Reilly hissed impatiently. “It's a long story, but I need you to-”

  Maksim sighed. “Is this ‘thing' man-sized, covered in sticky black shit, with big-ass claws?”

  “What?” Reilly replied, forgetting to stay quiet for a moment. She clamped her teeth together and listened for a second, her heartbeat thundering in her ears. A disturbing crunching sound was coming from the direction of the creature, and it had stopped savaging that side of her lab. She continued, whispering, “I didn't get a good look at it. The power went out before it came through.”

  Maksim groaned. “I knew it. I knew you had something to do with this. You all and your damned experiments.”

  “What?” Reilly’s heart started beating again. She was pretty sure she knew what he was about to say next, and it was…not good.

  “A…sort of hole opened up in the street outside my building, and these things started coming out. One came out of my bathroom about five minutes ago, while I was eating breakfast. Tried to chew on my head. You called just as I finished putting it down.”

  Reilly’s skin crawled at the ease with which he said, “putting it down.” But then she supposed this was hardly the first time he’d killed something. Or someone. But that wasn’t the important part of what he had said. “A portal opened up in the street? How big was it? Was it the only one?” She wanted to ask fifty more questions, but then she remembered the thing crunching away at something on the other side of the lab, and she shut her mouth.

  With the tone of someone trying very hard to maintain his calm, Maksim said, “It was about twenty feet across and round. Hovered maybe a foot off the ground.” There were rattling sounds, like metal buckles being fastened in the background. Several metallic clicking noises came next, which Reilly thought she recognized from movies. Maksim was checking his guns. After a minute, he said, “Judging from the screaming outside, these holes popped up everywhere. Bet you if I turned on my computer, YouTube would be full of cellphone videos of them. You're at the lab downtown?”

  “Yeah,” Reilly whispered. “The thing in the lab seems occupied. It hasn’t noticed me yet, but I don’t know how long that is going to last.” She didn’t dare take a look. “I need you to get here quick.”

  Maksim’s voice lost all of its tension, becoming smooth and professional like the recording on the answering machine. It was like he’d just switched off his emotions altogether. It still freaked Reilly out that he could do that. Did his emotions maybe have a physical switch? Considering who he was. “I'll be at your lab in about twenty minutes. Stay hidden and stay quiet.” He paused for a moment, and then said, more naturally, “I'll even give you a discount on my usual rates since we're friends.”

  Despite everything, Reilly smiled a little at this. She hadn’t known him for very long, little more than three months, but she’d learned to recognize Maksim’s attempts at humor when she heard them. But then again, considering the situation, there was a chance he wasn’t joking at all. And she couldn’t afford his rates, even at a discount. “Just get here quick. Good luck, and thank you.”

  “Thank me when I get there,” Maksim said, and then hung up. Without conversation to distract her, Reilly became acutely aware that she was alone in the dark wreckage of a room, with a monster that was almost certainly chewing on someone. She couldn't be sure, because of the chaos, but she hadn't heard the door on the far end of the lab open at all after it all began— and there had been fifteen other people in the room when the portal collapsed. Maybe they’re hiding, like me, she thought. And then, almost immediately after that crossed her mind, she thought, right, and maybe whatever’s out there is gnawing on all the spare bones I just keep in piles around my physics lab. That’s definitely it.


  Reilly was afraid. She’d never been more afraid. But for some reason, sitting in the dark listening to some kind of alien creature eating one of her colleagues, she found herself strangely calm. It was just too surreal. Her brain couldn't process what had happened in the last hour, so it had just stopped trying. So instead of wondering how long it would take the monster to get bored and start searching the room for someone else to kill, Reilly found herself wondering if the government would be canceling the grant for the project. “Technically,” she said to herself, “it was a success. We did, after all, open a portal to…somewhere.” Reilly wasn’t sure, but she figured unleashing unholy hell on all of Washington D.C. would be something of a black mark on her professional record—provided she, or anyone else, got out of this mess alive.

  Friday morning, Breach minus fifteen minutes

  Dr. Reilly McAllister was nervous. She didn't look it. She looked calm, collected, and in control, as she should. Her white lab coat was clean and freshly pressed, her long, platinum blonde hair was wound up in braids into a neat, professional knot, and her freckled face was set in an expression of utter confidence. In that room, in NextGen Laboratory 4B, she was the conductor, and the carefully orchestrated sequence that she would set in motion would be a perfectly performed symphony. With excellent colleagues, a comfortable budget, and the very best equipment, there was no part of the veteran physicist's plan that opened the door to error. In Lab 4B, everything was plotted out to exacting standards, then checked, rechecked, and checked again. In this lab, long-established ideas were challenged, boundaries were bent, and limits were broken. This was Dr. McAllister's arena, her home turf. Here, she could truly cut loose with her tremendous intellect, without worrying about budgets or politics or corporate intrigue. She should have been completely comfortable. But she wasn't. Something felt…a little off.

  It wasn’t the experiment that was the problem. Reilly’s team had been working on this project for the better part of six years, and Reilly herself had been working with the underlying theories for nearly a decade before that, ever since she’d started grad school. The team had constructed five smaller proof-of-concept devices before they’d even tried to scale up to full size. For the most part, the whole project had gone smoothly. This wasn’t even the first time they’d tested the device. It worked just fine. So there was no reason to think today would be any different. But still, Reilly was nervous. Though she didn’t show it on her face, her apprehension came out as a nearly compulsive need to triple check everything all over again. When one was working with the amount of raw energy that Lab 4B was trying to harness…

  “Dr. McAllister?” Reilly looked up to see Bill Haynes, her assistant, standing beside the sprawling control desk, concern in his dark eyes despite his attempts to keep it off his face. “Are you ready to begin?”

  Reilly took a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying to banish the strange sense of unease. She scanned the room. In addition to the usual five other members of her lab team, there were ten other people present to witness their experiment. Eight of them were other scientists, visiting from other departments within the massive edifice of NextGen Solutions. The other two were ‘Suits’—a none-too-affectionate nickname that the Reilly and her colleagues had for the government representatives that periodically showed up to ensure that federal funds were spent appropriately. She couldn't remember their names. She couldn't even be sure they were the same two reps every time. After all, they were so nondescript as to appear almost as bland as their dull gray suits. They might not have had the same features, but they all had the same…presence. They were supposedly from the Department of Energy, but Reilly somehow doubted that. More than likely one of the ‘alphabet soup’ of three-letter agencies was involved. The taller of the two checked his unremarkable watch and then looked over at her. She turned back to Bill, unsuccessfully pretending that the federal representative's cold stare didn't make her uncomfortable. Maybe that was it. The Suits bothered her. Sure. That was it. Nothing wrong with the experiment. Everything was fine. So why didn't she believe it?

  Reilly sighed. “I'm ready, Bill.” She forced some cheer into her voice and called out to the rest of her team, who stood at their various positions, monitoring the myriad parts of their device. “Is everybody ready to make history?” They all responded with customary enthusiasm, even Roger Lloyd, who stood before the machine dressed in an environmental suit. If anyone was more nervous than Reilly, it was him. He gave her a thumbs-up with his thick, rubber-gloved right hand. “Alright,” she said, turning back to the computer that took up most of the surface of the desk. “Let's start her up.” Reilly entered her password, opened the main control program, and activated the starting sequence. Then she looked up at the device.

  They called it ‘The Door.’ Perhaps that wasn't the most imaginative name they could have given it, but they were physicists and engineers, not marketing gurus. It was a three-meter-tall ring of metal, standing upright within a sturdy frame. The inner edge of the ring was smooth and bare. The outer edge was a spider's web of pipes, wires, and cables, each of them part of an intricate network that channeled energy into the Door in just the right way. As Reilly watched, the inner edge of the ring began to glow. The air in the lab became thick with static, and Bill's mop of brown hair began to stand up straight. Despite her tension, Reilly couldn't help but smile at this. It reminded her of the ‘mad scientists’ in the cartoons she had watched as a kid. Even then, she'd known who she wanted to be. Granted, this wasn't an evil lair, but that part of the gig had never appealed to her. She wanted to push the limits; to do what no one had ever done before. Abruptly, the glowing inner edge of the Door seemed to bleed into the air, sending tendrils of light into the circle of space it enclosed. It was like a giant hand was smearing the light like paint. Then, with a sudden crack of electrical discharge, the device became fully active. The Door was open. A mirrored, shimmering membrane filled the steel ring like a smooth plate of silvered glass. Reilly stared into the shining surface, and met her own green eyes in the reflection, staring out at her from behind rimless rectangular lenses. Her team had just opened a miniature wormhole in their lab in Washington, D.C., a portal to another place. A few of the onlookers let out short gasps. Reilly smiled to her reflected self. They were impressed now, but the actual experiment hadn't truly begun.

  Caught up in the familiar rhythms of her work, Reilly started to relax. Her voice was smooth and unhurried as she led the team through the various steps of their checklist. “Roger, check your safety harness.” The eager young grad student tugged at the H-style straps over his environmental suit to demonstrate they were tight, then gave the braided steel cable connected to his harness a little tug, rattling the oxygen bottles attached to his back. The cable spooled a little from the industrial strength reeling machine that stood between Reilly's desk and the gate. If anything went wrong, they could have him back in the lab in moments. But nothing was going to go wrong, they had performed this particular experiment with robots several times, and once with a lab monkey in a miniature version of the same suit that Roger was wearing. All of the previous explorers had come back from their short jaunt into the wormhole none the worse for wear. The monkey might have appeared a little frazzled, but that was to be expected. The only problem seemed to be that some sort of electromagnetic phenomenon was preventing the robots' sensors from recording much good information. The robots ran and operated fine. But they hadn't been able to record so much as a single video of what lay on the other side of the wormhole. The monkey couldn't tell them what he'd seen, obviously, so the way forward was clear. Roger, new to Lab 4B and eager to prove himself, had volunteered.

  Reilly watched Roger step up to the Door, and watched the retaining cable spool out from the reel. The cable wasn't a simple tether. Within the braided steel was an insulated line of wires that connected directly to a radio rig attached to Roger's harness. He couldn't transmit wirelessly once he was through, so her team had come up with a solution. So lo
ng as Roger stayed attached to his safety tether, they could talk to him, or pull him back if needed. The Door loomed around him as he stepped closer. Slowly, he lifted one hand to touch the mirrored surface. The moment his gloved fingers connected with the membrane, it rippled, then seemed to adhere to him, tugging lightly at his hand as if urging him forward. Roger appeared to steel himself. His voice came through a speaker I'd set up on my desk. “Alright. I'm going through.” Then he stepped straight into the rippling quicksilver surface of the open Door and was gone. Another gasp ran through the onlookers. Reilly suppressed a grin. That was exactly the reaction she had been expecting. It was the first time that her team had had spectators for this. The mirrored membrane warped and bent the reflection of the lab in its surface as the ripples began to settle, and for a moment, it seemed to Reilly that her reflection was smiling at her, a wide, full smile, even though her own lips hadn't parted. She blinked, and the illusion was gone. The surface of the Door slowly settled back into smooth stillness, but for minute ripples around the cable that snaked through it into the unknown place beyond.

  Reilly bent so that she was closer to the little microphone perched on her desk. “Roger? How are you doing in there?”

  There was a short delay, just long enough for a little of the nerves to creep back into Reilly's mind as she waited for Roger to reply. The cable continued to spool, slowly, through the Door. The explorer was walking, at a slow, steady pace. Everything was fine. He was probably just speechless at whatever he saw. The speaker crackled as Roger activated his microphone. “I'm doing great in here. Reilly, Bill, all you guys need to see this place. It's amazing.” As if he suddenly remembered that they were supposed to be serious scientists, Roger's voice switched from boyish enthusiasm back to crisp professionalism. “Alright, I'm standing on a solid surface. It's dark here, but I can see fine—which is difficult to explain. The ground seems smooth. Though there's some kind of dust coating it. I keep kicking it up as I move.”