15Nero passed his portable tracking monitor over to Vincent. It contained a subset of code. “Over there. Just outside those trees. We should find her in the next two miles. I’ll put down in the first opening I see,” he told the quiet man, who merely nodded.
Corporal Vincent Asgard needed a new voice box, but he refused to let Nero or Kyra install one. Nero had read the report—several times in fact. Nothing in it had indicated the mental issue stopping the man.
In his last instance of hand-to-hand combat during the war, Vincent’s throat had been ripped open by the jagged edge of an enemy’s fighting knife. The two men who had inflicted the original combat injury to him had finished their dirty work by methodically cutting his vocal chords. Then they’d sewn him up to force his cybernetics t
