Abiogenesis (14 page)

Somewhere in the rounds, they’d taken the extra precaution, she supposed, of implanting another locator, one she had no knowledge of. Or, maybe, considering the way the company operated, it had been there all along?

They had underestimated Reuel. He’d been two steps ahead of them all the way, waltzing his pieces across the chessboard as if he were clairvoyant and knew everything they would do before they did it.

The company’s determination to wipe the cyborgs out had given the cyborgs the opportunity to ‘free’ the hunters from the company’s control and nix any further attacks, for the foreseeable future anyway.

Of course, she supposed complete victory hinged on Reuel managing to catch the last ship before they managed to get away.

The cyborg led her up the gangplank and down a long corridor. Once inside, she saw it was a lab. She was striped and ordered to lie down on a table. She did as she was told, without questioning it. Ignoring the tech, who moved around her extracting blood and checking the fetus’ vital signs, she studied the ceiling lights and finally turned to look around the room. She saw then that there was a row of similar tables all the way to the far wall, separated only by a narrow strip of sheeting hung from hooks on the ceiling. A hunter was strapped to each, some being treated for wounds, others merely being examined.

Finally, she was rolled onto her stomach and the tech extracted the ‘hidden’ locator that had been attached to her spine.

When they’d finished, a flimsy gown was handed to her that tied around the neck and overlapped in the back to tie around her waist. Then she was escorted from the lab, along the corridor and down a flight of stairs. The compartment she found herself in was lined with cots. Hers was in one corner. She made her way to it and sat down, staring at nothing in particular, feeling curiously numb.

They hadn’t even told her if the baby was all right. She was tempted to access her inboard computer to assess it, but it occurred to her that it really didn’t have enough data to tell her anything more than whether or not the baby was still alive and growing.

She decided she didn’t want to know.

"Dalia?"

Dalia turned to look at the woman who’d called her name. It took several moments for recognition to set in. The name continued to elude her however. "How are you?"

The woman shrugged. "Just bruised and banged up a bit. I’ll live."

For some reason, that struck Dalia as funny. She snorted.

"You know something I don’t?"

Dalia shrugged. "I don’t remember your name."

The woman looked surprised for a moment, then frowned. "We trained together. Camile?"

Dalia nodded. "I remember. It’s just ... actually I never really paid much attention to anyone’s name. I figured it wasn’t a good idea to get to know anyone, considering...."

Camile shrugged. "I guess I can see your point." She frowned. "I couldn’t help but notice you were fighting with them, not against them. What’d they do, brainwash you?"

"They told me the truth."

Camile’s brows rose. "What truth?"

"That I ... that we, are the same as they are." She glanced around at the hunters nearest them. "We’re cyborgs."

Chapter Fourteen

"Speak for yourself, you traitorous bitch! You might be nothing more than a stinking machine, but I’m sure as hell not!"

Dalia stared at the woman across the aisle from her and Camile, recognizing her as one of those who’d trained with her. "Think about it, Zenia. Do you really think the company would risk precious human lives to clean up their mess? And what human would be able to single-handedly take on a cyborg?"

The woman made an abortive attempt to leap up from her cot, but Dalia saw she was chained to it. She wasn’t surprised. Zenia was probably the most unstable, and most fierce of all the female hunters. Her problem had always been that she completely lost it when she went into a fight. It was for that reason that, despite her skills, and her determination, she’d been defeated by the cyborgs she’d been sent to eliminate more times than she’d succeeded. She’d been patched up and put back together by the company so many times that even if she’d been born human, she was more machine now than anything else.

"I’ve taken down my share," Zenia gritted out.

Dalia’s lips curled. "Your logic circuits should have been replaced a long time ago. If you’re too stupid to grasp that, then think about this--Zenia. It’s a flower. Camile, Dalia. Do you think your parents just happened to name you after a flower and you just happened to end up in the hunter program? All of us? Every female in the hunter program bears the name of a flower. Doesn’t that seem like just too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence?"

"I remember my childhood," Camile said quietly.

"You remember what they imbedded in our programming. None of it happened to you. It happened to someone else, or it was computer generated. I don’t know that much, but I do know it’s true. Do you think I like it any better than you do? Do you know something I don’t? If you know something that proves beyond a shadow of doubt that the company didn’t lie to us, tell me. Because I’d much rather believe that I’m human."

Camile frowned, but she had paled. Like Zenia, she looked vaguely ill. "They said you were gestating. That the cyborgs had found a way to simulate reproduction."

Dalia sighed. Drawing her knees up, she covered her face with her hands. "We’re the next generation CO479, the new and improved model. They decided the CO479s had gone rogue because of faulty programming. So we were designed to be more human, to believe we were human. You shouldn’t be at all surprised to know they fucked up-- again. They made me, us, so human that the biological engineering took prominence. All of the human organs and glands they engineered for us began functioning in a purely human way, or purely biological way. Reproduction is part of that cycle. When they failed to include the critical materials for reproduction, our bodies, probably because of the rapid cell regeneration we were given, were able to improvise and evolve ... or at least mine did. I’m betting we will all find that we’ve evolved reproduction capabilities.

"It’s why the cyborgs were determined to capture all of you alive. We’re the same, except we have a future and they don’t. Maybe they figure they can discover what’s missing from them so they can change it.

"I honestly don’t know what the ultimate plan is, or even if there is one. All I do know is that they feel like, as cyborgs, we belong together, and, to their way of thinking, they have freed us from human bondage."

Zenia made a sneering sound and rattled the chain attached to her wrist. "If they’d asked me, I’d have told them I preferred human bondage. At least they didn’t keep me in chains," she growled.

Dalia lifted her head and stared at Zenia a long moment. "You’re so very reasonable, Zenia. I’m sure they’ll realize very quickly that you, of all of us, don’t need time to adjust--or even reprogramming."

Camile snickered, but tried to disguise it as a cough.

Zenia, naturally enough, took exception to the remark and began screaming profanity. Shrugging disinterestedly, Dalia laid down and turned her back on the woman. The snub only infuriated her more and she began beating the chain, trying to break it. After a few moments, three cyborgs marched into the room. One grasped her by either arm. The third injected her with something, and blessed peace settled over the hold.

There was nothing to mark the passage of time beyond the meals that were brought in and since Dalia didn’t know the schedule, even that didn’t help much. Two meals were delivered and then five more cyborgs were brought into the holding cell on stretchers.

Dalia thought they might be survivors of the craft that had crashed, but none of them were in any condition to communicate.

The lights were dimmed for a while and she slept. She was awakened hours later by the delivery of another meal. Several hours later, a large group of hunters was led in. Dalia sat up, examining them as they passed.

"That’s Lincoln. I saw Clinton and Kennedy, too. They were on the Valiant4."

Dalia glanced over at Camile. "The craft that managed to get away?"

Camile grimaced. "Obviously not."

Dalia settled back against the bunk, staring at the ceiling while she fought to still the frantic pounding of her heart. Reuel had come back. She hadn’t realized how worried she’d been that he wouldn’t until that moment, until she felt the terrible need to give vent to tears. She was still struggling with it when a stray thought abruptly popped into her mind. Amusement replaced the desire to cry and a chuckle escaped her.

"What?"

"The presidents. They named the males after presidents."

Camile stared at her blankly for several moments and finally chuckled. She sobered almost at once. "It’s true, isn’t it? What you said?"

Dalia sighed. "If I hadn’t believed it, I wouldn’t have said it. Sometimes, I’m still not sure I do, but maybe it’s because I don’t want to, not because there’s any room for doubt."

They’d just finished what Dalia thought was their evening meal when the bulkheads began to shudder and the sound of revving engines drowned the conversations within the hold. Almost as one, they looked around and then up at the ceiling, watching the lights above them flicker as power was diverted into the launch engines. The shuddering increased, became a hard rattle as the ship sluggishly lifted from the ground.

An invisible weight settled over them, pressing harder and harder until, abruptly, it ceased as they broke the planet’s gravity. For a handful of seconds disorientation set in and then artificial gravity kicked in and the sickening sense of imbalance disappeared.

Thereafter, the days seemed to meld one into another. Once they’d taken off, guards came through the room and released those who’d been restrained, including, unfortunately, Zenia. They were allowed to roam the hold, but not beyond it, except for twice a day when they were herded through the particle showers.

After perhaps a week, they began allowing the hunters to leave the hold in small groups to spend part of the day in the recreation room, but it was strictly for the hunters. Except for the guards in the viewing rooms above them, they saw none of the cyborgs. Dalia was disappointed, but not really surprised. She thought it was probably just as well. She didn’t particularly relish the thought of another encounter with Reuel. She would’ve liked, however, to know for certain that he’d survived.

She tried not to think about the baby as the weeks passed. Reuel had indicated that she’d forfeited her right to have anything to do with it after its birth. It was almost a relief. Until he’d pointed out how unfit she was to mother a child, she’d been afraid to acknowledge her self-doubts, but the truth was, she hadn’t been designed for such a thing and she was not only afraid it wasn’t something she could learn, she was fearful of the results of any efforts on her part. She didn’t know much about infants, but she did know that they were fragile and easily damaged.

What if she were to drop it? What if she fed it too much or fed it the wrong thing? What if it became ill? They couldn’t talk, not at first, anyway. What if it needed something and she couldn’t figure out what that was?

Just thinking about it scared her worse than anything had ever frightened her in her life. She was afraid of the birthing part, too, but not nearly as much. She knew how to deal with pain. She hadn’t engaged in fifty battles over the past three years and she hadn’t come off of all of them completely unscathed.

Apart from the fear, thinking about the baby made her feel indescribably sad. It seemed grossly unfair that nature had seen fit to give her the ability to reproduce and not given her any of the instincts or knowledge for mothering it. She had only to reference other living organisms in nature, however, to know that that wasn’t altogether uncommon even in other creatures. Reptiles didn’t nurture their young. There were even some species of mammals and birds that had little or no nurturing instincts, and, as often as not, failed to rear their offspring to maturity.

Shuddering at the thought, she realized that the best tact was to simply ignore it as much as she could.

That became more and more difficult as the weeks passed, however. The gestation didn’t follow the rules of human gestation. The fetus was developing at an accelerated rate. Her in board computer calculated maturity in little more than twenty weeks at its current rate and possibly less.

Not only was her belly ballooning almost before her eyes, but the odd little flutters she’d first felt quickly became uncomfortable punches in some very sensitive internal areas. By the time they’d been in the hold by her best guess, a month, the activity beneath her shift was sufficient to draw all eyes as she passed, even if they were polite enough to ignore the growing bulge.

Boredom, sadness and worry weren’t her only companions, unfortunately. Zenia had focused all of her fear of her situation, and all of her grief over her loss of ‘humanity’ into a fixated hatred of Dalia. After the incident when the guards had sedated her, she’d made it a point to keep her distance, but she stared at Dalia with hatred in her eyes, leaving her in no doubt that, sooner or later, Zenia would strike.

At any other time, she would almost have relished a physical confrontation, if only to relieve her boredom, but she’d learned her lesson. Danger for her meant danger for the fetus and she couldn’t risk it. Beyond that, she shuddered to think what Reuel would do to her if she were to find herself in the middle of another battle, whether it was of her making or not. At any rate, it was impossible to ignore the fact that the bigger the infant grew, the slower, clumsier and more vulnerable she became. If she were not burdened by the infant, she knew she could best Zenia in any contest of skills. In her current condition, she couldn’t.

Camile was friendly enough, but Dalia doubted it would occur to her to help if Zenia crossed the line and attacked. The same was true of most of the others. They were trained warriors. They might watch two warriors battle it out with interest, but it certainly wouldn’t occur to them to feel any need to intervene.