Cyborg Nation (15 page)

She didn’t think it would have occurred to Gideon that she might be trying to manipulate them if they hadn’t set out to manipulate her.

She still didn’t know why they’d abandoned the plan—although it was clear they had—but she was as certain as she could be that it
had
been part of their original orders.

She was equally certain that she wasn’t mistaken about their defensiveness and that it wasn’t just her bleeding heart that saw them as ‘wounded’. The humans who’d created them wanted to annihilate them … and they didn’t even feel the equal of their peers because they’d only been originally designed to perform a specific function. They could be soldiers, servants, or pleasure bots, but in every case they were expected to be slaves to humanity, puppets that could be used or discarded, where the others had been able to walk among humans and interact as their equals, completely undetected.

She actually felt more uneasy once she’d reasoned it out, though. It would almost have been easier to accept that she was ‘blameless’, under mind control—theirs--instead of her own. If she accepted that they hadn’t deliberately manipulated her, though, she also had to accept that her soft heart was once again working contrary to what should have been a much stronger instinct of self-preservation.
She
was flawed.

Of course there was no doubt that their motives for kidnapping her hadn’t been nefarious. They needed her and knew damned well no human was going to just volunteer to help them. That left them in the position of either doing without or taking what they needed.

That didn’t make it alright. On the other hand, she was obliged to admit that, if she’d been in the same position they were, worried about the health of her child, and she’d had no choice but to let the child suffer or take whatever steps necessary to see that it didn’t, she would’ve at least been tempted to do the same thing.

She still felt that she should’ve hated them for it. She still thought she shouldn’t have been able to empathize with them, let alone feel, more and more, a compulsion to heal their ‘wounds’.

She knew part of that growing need to give was linked to the physical attraction she felt toward them. If she had found them unappealing she would’ve been less inclined to be receptive to anything else.

Unfortunately that was so far from the case that it was downright embarrassing. Physically and sexually, they blew her mind. The fact that they seemed so emotionally needy was just the banana peel to complete her downfall.

And the thing that
really
distressed her was that she couldn’t figure out which one of them was going to be the tank that flattened her. From one day to the next, sometimes from one hour to the next, she teetered between them, drawn from one to the other like a bee that couldn’t make up its mind which blossom was sweetest.

Or maybe she was the flower and couldn’t decide which bee she most liked sipping at her nectar?

She felt horribly guilty about avoiding poor Gabriel, but she was already in enough trouble from giving in to Gideon and Jerico. If she had sex with him, too, and he had anything approaching the effect Gideon and Jerico had had on her—and she strongly suspected he would—then she would only be that much worse off, that much more confused, and that much closer to having a nervous break down. It was hard enough trying to back track and put a safer distance between her and the two she’d already been intimate with because she was having to fight her own needs and desires, not just theirs.

She couldn’t look at either Gideon or Jerico without remembering what they’d done to her, how they’d made her feel. She didn’t think she could’ve done so even if not for the fact that any time she met their gaze she saw it in their eyes that they were thinking about it, too. And even when she refused to make eye contact, the way they looked at her was enough to arouse her by itself.

The only self-defense she could devise, however, was to continue to avoid them as much as possible in the confined area of the ship. They made that easier on her by erupting into violent conflict more and more readily. The longer they were in space, the less it took to set one of them off.

By her best guess, they’d been in space for nearly a month, earth time, when she abandoned the cabin one day because Gabriel had gone in to sleep and discovered there wasn’t a sign of either Jerico or Gideon. The noises from the hold quickly answered the question of where they’d gotten off to. They’d been ‘arranging’ and rearranging the supplies in the hold for weeks, every few days at first and then almost every day, and then sometimes two or three times a day. As quickly as they healed, most of the time they went around looking like prize fighters.

They would vary their explanations for what they were doing in the hold. Sometimes they were ‘securing’ the supplies or ‘rearranging’ the load, sometimes they were ‘inventorying’ supplies, and sometimes they were ‘exercising’ or ‘practicing’ hand-to-hand combat to stay sharp.

She wouldn’t have thought it was possible to get used to them pounding the daylights out of each other at the drop of a hat, but, little by little, she’d stopped being totally unnerved by it. She
still
didn’t like it. It
still
set her teeth on edge and upset her besides because she hated to see the evidence of, not just their frustration, but their pain. She began, slowly, to accept, though, that it was in integral part of them, something that was unlikely ever to completely change.

She’d already settled on the bench to read when it abruptly dawned on her that it was the first time she’d found herself completely alone and unwatched. More importantly, it was the first time she’d been any where near the bridge without one or more of them standing between her and the controls.

The moment the thought jelled in her mind her belly twisted with fear and her heart began to pound so frantically she felt like she would suffocate. Her body seemed to go into rigor mortis, but her mind went wild with possibilities. Uneasily, she cut her eyes toward the hatch.

It was closed, as it usually was whenever they went below to ‘work’.

She glanced toward the cabin, wondering how deeply Gabriel was sleeping, or if he was still alert enough to put two and two together and realize that she was alone. Evidently, Gideon and Jerico were too preoccupied to realize she could be rambling around unattended.

Without consciously making a decision, Bronte set her book aside and slipped off of the bench. Her legs felt as if she had tied lead weights to them. Actually, her entire body felt as stiff and heavy as if it didn’t belong to her at all. Flicking darting glances between the hatch to the hold, the unattended bridge, and the door of the sleeping quarters, Bronte inched a little closer to the bridge.

By the time she finally reached it, she was weak and faint and ready to collapse from the adrenaline pulsing through her. Wilting into one of the seats, she turned to stare at the hatch again, trying to listen over the pounding in her ears. It didn’t particularly relax her when she finally identified enough banging around to ascertain that the battle was still in full swing, but she decided she could afford to spend a few moments studying over the control panels.

She could see at a quick glance that the set up was typical of others she’d seen, but then she had never done much more than glance at the control center of a vessel, or watch, without a lot of comprehension, as the pilots and co-pilots and navigators manipulated their various instrument panels and monitored the vid displays. Everything was clearly marked with legends, though, and she managed to identify what most of the various controls were for. To a great extent, she knew the ship pretty much flew itself, or more accurately the computer flew the ship, just as it maintained everything on the ship.

The pilot came in when maneuvering was needed, which was mostly at launch and landing but could also include the need to avoid an obstacle in space that might not have been there the last time one passed through. Nothing in space was ‘fixed’. It wasn’t like surface travel on some world where one could memorize all the landmarks and expect them to be in the same place when one made the return trip.

Piloting a space craft required not only lightening reflexes but extremely accurate reflexes because of the speed at which the ship was traveling and the often many times greater speed of the objects in space traveling toward it or on a course that bisected the ship’s course.

Therein was the rub. She might be able to convince the computer to turn around and head back if she could figure out the right coordinates. She might not even
have
to try to figure out how to trick the computer into listening to her, because it might not be secured against her voice, but she thought that most likely it was.

She couldn’t pilot the ship, however. Not only had she never done that, she was honest enough to accept that her reflexes were not only a long way from lightening fast, they were also a long way from pinpoint accuracy. As often as not, when she reacted, her coordination was clumsy at best and disastrous at worse.

And piloting wasn’t the only stumbling block. Navigation was critical. The ship’s course had to be carefully monitored and precisely corrected at regular intervals. They weren’t just traveling through ‘empty’ space. They were traveling through gravitational fields, mostly so weak that they couldn’t even feel them, and yet they were still enough to effect the ship, to alter its course in one direction or another as it was pulled at from first one direction and then another. Drifting so much as a hair’s breadth at point A could mean not just missing the planet one was aiming at. It could mean missing the entire solar system, or maybe even the galaxy.

The best she could hope for would be to retrace their course and hope that she could get close enough to communicate with someone who could come and get her, or slow the ship down enough they could catch her in a tractor beam and pull her in.

After glancing around quickly to make certain no one had spotted her yet, Bronte moved to the seat Gideon generally occupied, which allowed him to monitor both the ship’s controls and the navigational controls. She stared at the star chart displayed on the vid, trying to find a point of orientation. She wasn’t a lot more accustomed to star charts than she was the ship’s controls, but every kid in school had to learn to identify the major population centers—occupied solar systems—in their own galaxy and, of course, the galaxy itself plus the known galaxies around it.

Nothing looked even vaguely familiar to her, though, she realized in dismay. Frowning, she fell to studying the clusters on the display, wondering if it was just the direction that made the patterns look different—because galaxies
had
an identifiable pattern that could be memorized and she should’ve been able to recognize at least one.

A shadow fell across the screen. She didn’t even realize it for a split second, except she noticed there was no longer an irritating, reflective glare from the lighting behind her.

Gideon, she saw when her brain finally connected ‘no glare’ with ‘shadow’, was standing over her, his face a mirror of fury. Bronte gaped at him in absolute horror for several moments.

He didn’t ask her what she was doing. He didn’t need to. There could be no doubt whatsoever what she was doing.

Bronte didn’t even try to think up a lie. It was pointless to try even if she could’ve managed any sort of mental acrobatics when she had no excuse at all for being where she was.

She bolted upward out of the seat as if she’d been ejected from it and made a valiant attempt to dive past him. He caught her as she rushed past, hooking an arm around her waist and allowing her momentum to carry her full circle until he had her trapped between himself and the wall. Trapped, Bronte gaped up at him, belatedly recalling that he’d told her that, while she didn’t have to worry that any of them would hurt her for any reason, that didn’t mean she didn’t have to concern herself that there would be
no
retaliation for anything she did. Unfortunately, instead of inspiring fear and by virtue of that, a sense of self-preservation, that memory triggered the memory of what he’d done to ‘teach her a lesson’ for biting him. Her reaction was instantaneous. Heat flooded her and her belly went weightless.

It was at that precise moment that she noticed several things about him that she’d failed to notice in the first few moments of sheer terror.

Rage didn’t exactly, or at least not totally, describe his expression. It was rather equal parts anger and raging desire.

He was shaking, his breath heaving raggedly in and out of his chest, obviously in the grips of conflicting emotions a lot more powerful and chaotic than just anger.

A split second before he plastered his mouth over hers and totally annihilated brain function altogether, another memory popped into her mind—the last time he’d looked at her that way was when Gabriel and Jerico had pulled him off of her, telling him he couldn’t touch her when he was still caught up in the grips of battle lust.

Fear didn’t have time to emerge above her own desires or dampen it. The thought had barely lit in her mind when she felt the pressure and infinitely welcome adhesion of his mouth over hers, felt his heat and desire invade her senses with the force of a neutron bomb as his tongue raked over hers possessively, filling her with the heady taste and scent that was uniquely his and more intoxicating that a fifth of one hundred proof alcohol. Full-fledged arousal inundated her at the same instant fear driven adrenaline shot through her heart like a spear. Her entire body instantly lost all muscle tone. If he hadn’t been holding her, pinning her to the wall with his body, she would have dissolved into a puddle of boneless flesh at his feet.

He hadn’t touched her in far too long, she realized dimly, held at bay by her determination to keep a safe distance from him, but it hadn’t been nearly long enough for her body to forget his effect on her. Without a murmur of protest or any coyness, everything inside of her opened fully to him, blossomed into readiness.

The tearing sound and pull against her uniform as the front closure parted penetrated her mind a split second before she felt Gideon’s hand close over one breast, squeezing it. She opened her eyes with an effort as he broke the kiss, lifting his head to look down at her breasts as he fondled them, plucking at her nipples until both were standing erect and hard and pulsing with acute sensation.