Oracle. Lunatic. Soldier. Assassin. Murderer. Superhuman.
Queen of Shadows, Knight of Vengeance, Mistress of the Sword.
The Devil had a daughter and he named her "Tryne"...
Roberta Jeanette Killinger was once a soldier for an elite unit of the U.S.
military. She was trained as a computer expert and pilot, and was an
experienced field operative. But on a deep-cover, covert Black Ops assignment,
she was betrayed and captured by a cyberterrorist organization and became the
subject of their deadly experiments.
Her mind wiped, her body forever altered with bio-cybernetic implants and
nanotechnology, her consciousness infused with mysterious occult energy,
Roberta Killinger, codenamed "Tryne", became a pawn in a greater game between
criminal terrorists and rogue spy networks. Electro-chemically enslaved to an
organization she knew to be criminal, she fought for control of her destiny and
to regain her freedom.
And then one day, sent reluctantly into the field by her captors on a mission
that degenerated into a street war with foreign police, she met a shadowy
figure who held the key to her past life and information about those who had
betrayed her. He passed to her the keys to her freedom -- and to her revenge.
And on that day, Roberta Killinger awakened from her nightmare as a pawn in a
game of kingmakers and became a Knight of Vengeance. She truly became the
deadly, triple-threat, super-powered avenger named Tryne...
No Fear. No Mercy. No Equal. No Problem.
Heaven help us all, the Devil's Bastard Daughter is coming home...
*** (Excerpt from "TRYNE: Homicidal Cognition") --
She awakened groggy in a crater nearly half an inch deep. The bullet holes in her exoskeletal, self-generated body armor were already closing, stitching back together.
Okay, she had learned something new, although it was an amazingly painful lesson: she could take an eight-round blast from an AK-47 and still survive.
Knowledge was power. Self-knowledge was frightening.
She wondered if this was how Shelley's fictional Frankenstein's Monster must have felt.
Street traffic was a weary, whistling rush against a backdrop of fuzzy electronic humming as she opened her eyes. Yellow-white nimbuses, ghostly blobs of luminescent color, danced under her vision as she scanned her surroundings. She was having trouble focusing on anything for more than a second. She shook her head and immediately regretted the motion as her inner ear's equilibrium bobbed to and fro... It hurt to move. She'd had the wind knocked out from her. She silently cursed her fuzzy-headedness.
Five stories was a long way to fall. Her body was still trying to recover from the impact. No doubt the army of nanomachines racing through her bloodstream were swarming like angry bees, desperately upping her T-Cell count to force immediate repair of her damaged body.
She didn't have time for this. Braxton and his squad of mercenaries were coming for her. She had to move.
She sat up, slowly, and then shakily rose to one knee, surveying the shadows draping the alley next to the brick and steel pharmaceutical laboratory she lay behind.
Her nervous system suddenly shimmered with a surge of fire that sent a hot, searing lance of energy up her spine. Her neuronet sensors were back online. She was again tracking the details of the physcial space around her in six dimensions: touch, sight, smell, sound, geometric proximity, gravitic chronometry. She could again feel everything around her in a 270-degree arc.
Why was she here again...?
Imprisonment. Escape. Close quarters combat. Bullets. Blood. Bodies falling. "Virotechnika". Lucido, Wannamaker, Braxton, the merc unit, Braintrust Aleph. It was rapidly coming back to her. The persistence of memory...
Her name was Roberta Jeanette Killinger, a Captain, ex-U.S. Air Force. Was. As in "once upon a time". That was before the Balkan peninsula in southeastern Europe, before Belgrade in Bosnia, before "Operation Steel Monk". Before her betrayal to Braintrust Aleph. Before torture and mutation. Now she was known as subject "R17, H/K Division Gold", codenamed "Tryne". Tryne: human, mutant, machine. A thing. No longer human, but something more, something different. Something alien. She was a covert Black Ops agent. She was a high-tech, one woman S.W.A.T. team, literally an "Army of One".
She was a cyborg death-machine.
She was on the run.
Major Ulysses Braxton was a contractor for The Braintrust, a quasi-legal private intelligence firm that was actually a for-hire criminal organization, and he and his squad of four men, ex-special forces commandos, had been assigned to retrieve Roberta after she had "gone rogue", abandoning the field mission The Braintrust had originally sent her on.
She was goddamned if she was going to allow a bunch of money-worshipping, Yuppie executive terrorists send her out on missions of assassination like she was some mechanized attack dog.
Besides, she knew the target personally, from back when she'd been human... not that the target would recognize her anymore. Didn't matter. She was no killer, no matter how many anti-inhibitor drugs and low-level psychotropics they had her on, courtesy of her built-in subdural injector system. No brain-altering drug and no drug-induced, hypnotic trance could force her to do things against her personal moral code.
She was Roberta Killinger. She was still herself. The implanted identity of Tryne hadn't completely taken over her conscious mind. At least, not yet.
But, if she was honest with herself, she could feel the cold fury of the homicidal artifical intelligence she shared her brain with in the background, a feral persona eager to create chaos and cause endless destruction. If she was honest with herself, she would have to admit it...
Someday, dammit, probably sooner than later, the beast within her was going to win.
But not today...
*** ( END of excerpt)
“TRYNE” and all related concepts (including Roberta Jeanette Killinger, “Virotechnika”, Braintrust Aleph, Major Ulysses Braxton, "R17, H/K Division Gold", "Operation Steel Monk") copyright © 2006 by JOSEPH ARMSTEAD
