Now, they prepared themselves as the unpowered missiles went active, coming online and lancing after the alien craft.  The alien frigates didn't seem surprised to come under attack; they merely altered course and started to open fire with their point defence.  Half of the missiles kept targeting the frigates anyway, the remainder altered course and headed down towards the planet.  Assuming the odd radio signals were actually alien settlements, the cyborgs had decided when they were planning the operation, the aliens would have to concentrate on preventing the missiles from punching through the atmosphere.  Unless they had radically good sensors, they would have no way to tell that the missiles carried no warheads.  They’d be forced to assume nukes – or worse.

The concept of unleashing nuclear fire on alien civilians didn't bother the cyborgs.  They’d had emotional reactions engineered out of them.  Ivan had watched, dispassionately, as his fellow cyborgs had waged murderous war on the enemies of Mother Russia.  The fact that those enemies included subversives who were, technically speaking, Russian themselves didn't bother him either.  If they chose to defy the government’s orders, they deserved all they got.  It had been programmed into him on the day of his rebirth.

There were times when he wondered who he’d been before he'd entered the cyborg program and turned into a monstrous amalgamation of flesh and metal.  Memories of another life sometimes flickered through his dreams, suggesting that once he’d been something other than a cyborg.  But the dreams were nothing more than illusions, he’d been told.  It wasn't something to concern himself with, not when there was no shortage of work to do.

At precisely the right moment, the cyborgs uploaded the final set of commands into the shuttle, triggering a series of explosive bolts.  Wrapped in protective orbs, they plunged out of the shuttle and rocked down towards the planet’s atmosphere, surrounded by the pieces of the shuttle.  To human sensors, at least, it would look as through the shuttle had broken up in flight, perhaps after launching the missiles that had bedevilled the alien frigates.  But if it failed ...

Ivan had no doubts.  He’d done all he could.  Now, all he could do was wait and drop through the planet’s atmosphere.  And if they failed, they failed.

It was all the same to the cyborgs.

***

“Two alien carriers destroyed, nine smaller ships picked off,” Farley reported.  He nodded to the display, which was swarming with red icons.  “I think we made them mad.”