Aries Revealed Read Online Free Page A

fired their first shot on the battlefield. Hell, give him a tea trolley and some spare time and he could take their entire command structure out while they had their morning brew.
    And here he was acting like a damn randy Gemini looking for a lay. Shaking his head, Johnny shut the android’s front plates, his hands under the plastic and synth-skin covered breasts as he found and pressed down on the latches with his thumbs. To anyone watching it would look like he was copping a quick feel, but nothing could be further from the truth. The latches caught, the tiny click more felt than heard, and he twisted to pick up the sealing wand, running it down the cut in the synth that had the ‘droid open from clavicle to pelvis.
    “You’re looking for a cyborg bot? Are you sure?”
    Cyn’s voice filtered through from the main shop, the tone in it making Johnny frown as he finished closing the android. Using his implants, he uplinked with it and sent it off to stand between a gladiator and a sexy secretary model.
    “We don’t tend to carry many like that because of the potential for panic. Yes, they really can be that lifelike. Just last week I had to recover one of my gladiator bots from the arena because the client misplaced it and the authorities thought he’d escaped.”
    Moving to the door, Johnny stood behind the one-way mesh, the iridescent fabric concealing his form while allowing him to see the interior of the shop clearly. Like most bot-shops, it was large, with several circular podiums dotted along the walls. Each contained an android, the wall mirrored behind them to show the product off to potential customers. Down the center of the room was a runway of sorts, its edges marked out with tiny strip lights. Every so often a model would activate and take a walk down the runway, pausing to pose before returning to its original place.
    That was where Cyn had the opposition beat hands down. Her bots walked and talked like the real thing, none of the time lag or wooden movements and expressions of her competitors work as her skill with android mechanics shone through.
    What astounded him was that it was just a hobby, something she’d picked up on the side while they’d been deployed in the ass end of beyond somewhere with just themselves and androids for company. The damn things always broke down, and as the squad’s cybernetics expert, Cyn was the only one who’d had half a clue what to do to get them working again. It was that or dig their own latrines and they were so not going there.
    “Com’on, shift that ass,” he muttered as one of the dancing girls shimmied across his field of vision and blocked his view of the customer with the query. Like Cyn, his hackles had gone up at the request for a cyborg. Sure, they were well hidden through a combination of new identities, hacked from some provincial backwater planet’s governmental mainframe, and Cyn’s ability to replace most of their implants with shielded tech that foiled every scanner they’d come across. The worry that something new would come out that she couldn’t foil, that they would be caught with their pants down, was always there in the back of his mind.
    The bot moved. Johnny dragged a startled breath in.
    “Shit.”
    There, in the center of the shop, was the woman from last night. Stunned, his gaze took in every inch of her appearance, from the dark curls piled on top of her head, secured haphazardly with a pair of chopsticks right down to the heavy boots of a dockworker. The docks…why hadn’t he thought of that? The timing of her visits, her relaxed style…all the clues clicked into place. She crewed on the freighters.
    He watched her carefully, scrutinizing the straightness of her bearing without getting distracted by the sexy curve of her neck revealed by the messy up-do and the direct look and firm manner she used dealing with Cyn. No, she wasn’t crew. He’d bet his last credit she was an owner-operator of one of the big rigs currently on