MARS (BBW Bear Shifter MC Romance) (MC Bear Mates Book 1) Read online

  Toby scratched his beard, the only sound in Kat’s silent car. Then he let out a loud laugh. “Always have to take the moral high ground. You haven’t changed since I saw you last, sis. Even back then, you were always gracing me with your vast wealth of life experiences, your magnanimous wisdom, your blinding intelligence,” he said, his hand on the door handle now. “I’m going inside, Kat. I’d rather listen to the addicts bitch about their awful luck than sit in here listening to life advice from my younger sister. As if she’d never fucked up before.”

  He opened the door and stepped out into the crisp night air. Kat watched him, hurt at what he said – but relieved that he was going inside and going to see this through. “You know, we’re twins, Toby. That makes us the same age.”

  “You’re younger by twelve minutes!” Toby said, slamming the door before she could argue back. He pulled his hood up even farther, put his hands into his hoodie pocket, and moved towards the front door. He was walking fast, whether it was to get out of the cold or just to get away from her, Kat couldn’t tell.

  She rolled down the window, yelling after him, “Love you!”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Toby called back over his shoulder, waving one hand towards her as he reached the front doors. He opened them just enough to slide through them and was out of sight. Kat let out a breath she hadn’t even realized she’d been holding. Dealing with her brother was always like walking on eggshells, and he was worse now, more than ever. She’d dodged a bullet with this one.

  She glanced at the clock. It was 10:04. She was already late. She was never late. It was all part of her system. She fidgeted in her car seat as she waited to see if Toby would bail out. She saw him walk into the room, everyone turning at the latecomer. The man in the center waved him over and Toby sheepishly came towards the group, grabbing a donut as he passed by the table. For once, she saw him smiling.

  10:06. The arm couldn’t wait any longer. Kat pulled onto the dark road and sped off towards Animus Engineering.

  *

  Kat pulled up minutes later and parked in the deserted parking lot. She was out of car immediately, running towards the concrete and glass building, a relic of a time when Soviet bloc architecture was all the rage. It was dark, oppressive, and looming – and it was Kat’s home away from home.

  Inside, Kat flashed her badge to the security guard, an older man who waved her through with hardly a second glance. Then she was moving into the bowels of Animus Engineering. One part of the lab looked like a robot slaughterhouse: the walls were covered in shelves, crates of archaic prototypes balanced precariously on them. Primitive limbs poked out from boxes on the floor, wires sprouting out of them. Some arms ended in wide clamps, others in a mockery of a human hand. There weren’t as many robotic legs in Animus, but they were there, too: thick, white ones half torn apart, others that ended in hinged wedges, fake shoes, and anything else the mad engineers in here had dreamed up.

  This part of the lab was part storage, part tomb; a reminder of all of the ways they had tried to make different human prostheses, and failed. If Kat had spared even a glance at them, though, it wouldn’t have phased her. The owner of Animus, Mr. Cartwright, always insisted that his engineers should be in close proximity to their failures, to remind them to always keep striving, and Kat agreed with him. It was part of her code.

  Kat peeled back a massive plastic sheet that ran from the ceiling to the floor and entered. The plastic sheeting created a small room inside of the larger lab. Her room. Her laboratory. Inside, her assistant, Simon, was already seated at a rolling stool in front of a shelf of computers. He was leaning forward, intent on his readouts, and didn’t hear her come in.

  Kat immediately felt her eyes drawn to the screen Simon was staring at. It was a readout of their lab: power, humidity, tension, resistance, and a multitude of other bits of information Kat barely skimmed over. She had seen enough: they were ready.

  Simon turned in his chair, jumping when he saw her. “Didn’t hear you come in, Kat.”

  She flashed him a smile. Simon was a few years younger than her and had been hired on at Animus immediately after graduating college. He liked to brag that technically, he had been hired while he was still in college, and Kat never saw the need to argue with him. Despite his quirks, he was a good kid. His tousled hair and stubble on his jaw reminded her of Toby, but now wasn’t the time to think about her brother. Now was time to test the prototype.

  “Is it ready? Are we ready?” she breathed. Now that her eyes were on it, she couldn’t look away. The prototype was in every way perfect, if it worked. Seated behind a sheet of glass, Kat looked it up and down. The socket was designed to interface with an amputee’s upper arm, reading slight electrical signals throughout the body. It had an articulating elbow and a wrist with flex and tension. Each one of the five fingers attached to the hand was in itself a technical miracle, something never seen in the history of the world before, let alone the entire working arm. Eight hundred and nineteen patents went into making this arm, all designed with one purpose in mind: letting someone hold a cup of coffee again. Let them have their real arm back. Let them hold their loved one’s hand. Let them live again.

  The leg prototype sat next to the arm. It had all of the same functions as the arm. It let an amputee walk with a natural stride, not impending them in the slightest. You could walk up a 30 degree slope or even ice skate. It was a marvelous act of engineering, and she mused, a little bit of mad engineering.

  But the leg prototype wasn’t what really drew her attention. Simon had focused on the leg, and Kat had focused on the arm. In a way, it was Kat’s baby. The one thing she truly cared about in this world, besides her brother. All of her work in her life had lead up to this.

  “You know, Kat, I almost started without you. You’re never late,” Simon joked. Neither of them laughed.

  “Is it ready?” she repeated.

  “It’s as ready as it’s ever going to get.”

  Kat reached out her hand and touched the glass. Three years of work, and it all came down to this. This was it. Either the prototype would work, mirroring a human limb, or it would fail, miserably. The thought of that made her physically sick to her stomach. She pushed it away.

  Simon handed her a clipboard. She took it absentmindedly, eyes still on the limb in front of her. She looked down at it, double and triple checking the numbers on it. She knew the math was right. She’d done it herself, and she was never wrong. This would work. It had to.

  “Kat, you know there’s a chance this won’t work. No matter what your math says. We’ve ran the simulations, done everything perfectly, but it just might not work. If it doesn’t…”

  Kat glanced over at Simon, who pushed his glasses a bit further up on his nose. The rest of his sentence didn’t need to be said. If the prototype worked, the world was about to change. If it didn’t… well, it would be a quick and painful march up to Mr. Cartwright’s office. She’d be the one to explain that the prototype technology that Animus Engineering was depending on was a failure, and she’d take the full blame for it. But it wouldn’t just be a regular failure: it would be a failure because Simon and she had deceived Mr. Cartwright.

  If the prototype was a failure, she might as well pack her bags before heading up to his office.

  Kat looked once more at the prototype sitting lifeless behind the glass. No one else in the world had even come close to making anything like this. Even dreaming of making something like this was a pipe dream for everyone else.

  “This is it, then. There was no other way.”

  “Kat,” Simon said, rolling his chair over to her. “We’ve been over this countless times. We were getting a hundred milliseconds of lag before. Maybe that doesn’t seem like a lot to some people, but you know the ramifications of it. It wouldn’t be a real limb. You can’t drive a car with that kind of delay. You can’t make split second decisions. Can’t play sports with your kids.” Simon rubbed a hand along his jaw. “You know that what we did is the right cal
l. We set out to make a real prosthesis. If we hadn’t done a few… hacks, then this wouldn’t be real. It wouldn’t be what we set out to do. And if it works, Cartwright isn’t going to care how we got here. He’s just going to care that we did.”

  Kat found herself nodding, though she couldn’t push the uneasiness away. Everything that Simon had said was true. They’d discussed it hundreds of times. They’d spent hours debating the moral implications of deceiving Cartwright and the legal ramifications if something like this failed. Everything about it railed against Kat’s code, but she knew that Simon was right.

  If they hadn’t done what they had done, quite simply, the prosthesis would never work the way it needed to. And her life’s work wouldn’t be seen as a triumph; instead, it would be a failure, even if the limb succeeded. It simply wasn’t good enough.

  So, together, she and Simon had gotten ahold of an unapproved power source and devised some different lines of code, stuff that gave the limb just the edge it needed. They were working outside of Cartwright’s parameters, his code. Kat felt guilty betraying him, but it was too late to go back now.

  Kat shrugged, saying, “What’s the worst that could happen? It’s not like oscillating power isn’t approved by the FDA, right?”

  Simon and Kat really did let out a laugh then, if only to ease the tension. “The FDA doesn’t know what good technology is and what isn’t. Plus, you and I both know that it’s the only way to make this thing work,” Simon said.

  “What if it does work?” Kat finally asked. It was the one question on both of their minds that they had avoided talking about. They knew if it didn’t work, they were in a world of trouble with Cartwright. If it did…

  “Well, we’re probably fucked,” Simon said. “It’s not like the FDA is going to change their policies just because we proved them right.”

  Another shrug. “At least we’re trying to make a difference. Let’s fire her up.”

  Simon rolled back to the computer array. For once, his posture improved and he sat up straight. One finger hovered over the key that would initiate the test. He took a deep breath, and said, “Beginning the test in three… two… one!” And his finger dropped to the enter key.

  A whirring noise came from the interface machinery connected to the arm.

  Kat found herself holding her breath, her heart nearly exploding in her chest.

  In front of them, the arm twitched. Fingers contracted and extended. The hand clenched. Kat and Simon looked at the readout.

  “What’s the delay?” she asked.

  “Miniscule. It worked. No noticeable delay.”

  “No delay,” Kat muttered, dumbfounded. “No delay!”

  “No delay!” Simon repeated.

  And then they both jumped in the air in triumph, something that was definitely not in Kat’s code.

  *

  “Holy shit, you’re Briggs Dawson!” a voice said from behind him. “The first, and only, Shifter to be drafted by the professional football league! You were my hero, man! Oh, shit, what happened to you?”

  Briggs Dawson grabbed a donut and turned around, looking at the man coming towards him. The last thing he had wanted was to be recognized down here. He fought back a guttural growl. Even so, he could feel his chest reverberating with it, but no sound came out. He hated it here, and he hated what being here represented.

  The man coming at him was small, though most men were small to him. The man wore a ragged hoodie and ripped jeans. His brown hair was messy and his facial hair was even messier. He moved in an uneasy way and it didn’t take long for Briggs to guess what he was in here for. Still, Briggs sniffed and found that this man, for all of his flaws, wasn’t a bad man. There wasn’t a menacing bone in his body.

  “That’s me,” Briggs said, biting into the donut and swallowing it in half a bite, ignoring everything the man had said. The man extended a hand, looked Briggs up and down and saw his hand on the donut, and put it back towards his side.

  “Shit man. Sorry. You, uh, you still playin’?” he asked, his hands nervously sliding across his jeans. He talked fast, but he meant well.

  “They kicked me out,” Briggs said. “Didn’t you hear?”

  There wasn’t a lot Briggs liked to talk about, but being a member of the professional football league, if only briefly, was one of them. For once in his life, he had felt important. Special. Needed. It wasn’t just his six foot, six inch frame that set him apart from the rest of the guys. He’d been respected for his leadership qualities on the field and his good nature off of it. For what he did for his community. It wasn’t often that Shifters were portrayed in a positive light, even after the Integration Act of 2007. Briggs had set out to make a difference in not just football, but the world. But eventually, the Supreme Court got involved, and that was that.

  The man rubbed a hand on the back of his neck. “I’ve, uh… I’ve been out of the loop for a while.”

  “The Supreme Court ruled it illegal for Shifters to be involved in professional sports with other players. Something about it being an unfair biological advantage against human players. I barely had half a season before they cut me. You didn’t hear?”

  “Shit,” the wiry man said, hand still on his neck. “I guess not.”

  “You’ve been out of things for a long time, then,” Briggs said. The man nodded.

  “Alright everyone, break’s over! Gather back around the circle!” their group leader, Sam, told them.

  “Shit,” Briggs said.

  As they made their way back over towards the circle and sat down, the man asked, “So what have you been up to since they kicked you out?”

  If the man noticed the flash of pain across Briggs’ face, he didn’t say anything. Images flashed in his mind: the humiliation of being denied entry onto his team’s plane. His fiancé gone with most of his belongings and all of his money. His house gutted and sold. Armed with only his duffel bag, he’d walked four miles until he’d wound up at the nearest Marine recruiting office. Fallujah. The pain. And his life, going in a downward spiral.

  “Maybe we’ll talk about that later, friend,” Briggs said, popping the rest of the donut in his mouth and trying to push those memories away.

  “You can call me Toby,” the man said, extending his left hand. Briggs wiped his fingers on his dirty jeans and shook it firmly.

  *

  Leaving Simon at the computers, Kat found herself running towards Cartwright’s office. It wasn’t something she ever did – but tonight was something else. They had finally done it. After years of work, the Aegis prototypes were working. Perfectly.

  She entered the outer office unannounced. Jane, Cartwright’s secretary, said, “He’s on the phone with Mr. Stover right now. You’ll have to have a seat, Kat.”

  “Can’t wait,” was all Kat said. Out of the corner of her eye, Jane started to get up, but Kat was in Cartwright’s office before she could protest further.

  Kevin Cartwright sat in front of her, legs kicked up on his desk, eyes closed. He looked like he couldn’t care less about what Mr. Stover was saying. When he heard his door open and slam shut, he immediately sat up and looked at Kat, suspicion on his face.

  Cartwright had built Animus Engineer from the ground up. Forty years ago after he had come back from Vietnam, he hadn’t known what he wanted to do with his life. He had moved back in with his father, an aging man in desperate need of a dangerous hip replacement. The technology wasn’t advanced enough for the doctors to safely replace his hip, though – so Cartwright had taken it into his own hands.

  He’d always been hands on, and after less than a year, he’d created a new type of screw that could safely be used in hip replacements, even in worse case scenarios, like his father’s. He’d patented it, saved his father’s life, and saved his own.

  Within a few short years, he had moved out of his father’s garage and founded Animus Engineering, becoming a cornerstone of the engineering community. It wasn’t often that anyone in the field tried something without f
irst running it by Cartwright, and when they didn’t, it usually failed. He was a fair and wise man, smarter than most that had come before him, and certainly smarter than most who had come after him.