Cyborg Nation (2 page)

It was hard and angular, purely masculine and yet so classically formed and appealing ‘beautiful’ was the first thought that popped in her mind. Framed by long, beautiful blond hair that hung loosely well past his shoulders, ending just past the hard male breasts that still bulged from the thing he held, she was dimly aware that hair that luxuriant should have looked completely out of place on a man who looked so very, very … male, and yet it didn’t. The glossy, wavy hair only seemed to emphasize his masculinity, to set off his god-like perfection to greatest advantage.

What were the odds, she thought distractedly, of finding herself in a lift with three such exceptional specimens? Astronomical, she decided, even though she couldn’t seem to focus her mind on running the calculations, because she hadn’t seen a single man in all her years that came close to even one of them.

“This is Dr. Nichols,” said the man behind her at just about the time Bronte managed to free her gaze from the sapphire-eyed blond god before her and glanced down at what he held.

She frowned as she stared at the filing unit he held and a flicker of recognition dawned. Instantly diverted, she looked the piece over more carefully. It didn’t just look familiar. It
was
familiar! It was hers!

Doubt instantly swept over her, though, as it occurred to her to wonder why in the world anyone would take her files from her office—the whole filing unit! She frowned, wondering if she’d forgotten to pay her office rent and was being evicted … or if they’d simply decided to move her. Indignation filled her at that thought.

“This is B. A. Nichols?” the blond man questioned, tilting his head to study her curiously. “The data banks listed a male.”

“Obviously not current,” the black haired man holding her commented. He almost seemed to shrug. “They are … inefficient.”

Bronte craned her neck to look up at the man. “They?” she echoed, feeling the sting as a personal insult even though she had nothing to do with updating the data bank herself.

He caught her face in the crook between his thumb and forefinger before she could look away, studying her face with that same unnerving intensity of before. “She is obviously qualified, however, in her field else she would not be practicing medicine.”

Bronte stared up at him, fighting the mesmerizing effect he had upon her, realizing dimly that although his words seemed no more than a dispassionate appraisal of her skills as a physician, the look in his eyes, to say nothing of the brick hard erection digging into her backside, seemed to indicate his thoughts were not entirely on her credentials.

“What’s going on here?” she managed to ask as it finally dawned on her that there were undercurrents besides those heated waves eddying through her at the nearness and rapt attention she held of all three men.

Instead of answering her question, the man released his hold on her. She stared up at him a moment longer and turned to look at the other two men. She hadn’t imagined she held center stage. The other two men were studying her with the same intensity. Without any indication of discomfort at all, they held her gaze for several moments and then the three men exchanged a look very like the one the first two had exchanged before when the second man had gotten on the lift.

“She is young. Should we look for someone with more experience?”

Bronte frowned indignantly at the man with the dark, brown hair, torn between a feminine desire to maintain her youth and a professional desire to defend her experience. “I
am
young,” she snapped. “I was not only at the top of my class. I was the
youngest
in my graduating class!
And
I took over my father’s practice nearly a year ago … besides my years in residence! I am
fully
qualified!”

None of them looked as impressed as she felt like they should have, but then again it struck her that, of the three, she’d never seen anyone any better at hiding their thoughts behind such expressionless masks. Aside from the faint frowns that flickered across their faces, that looked like a mixture of speculation and puzzlement, they gave nothing else away.

They seemed to come to some sort of tacit agreement, though, as the lift halted once more and the doors opened. Bronte’s gaze was drawn by the movement. Surprise filled her when she discovered they were on the roof. In the distance, the sky was just beginning to lighten with the promise that the sun would soon crest the horizon.

Closer to hand, though, blocking most of the view, sat a sleek black star cruiser, its hatch open and gangway extended like a tongue. She’d barely registered the ship, which had no business at all on the roof of the med center since it was clearly
not
an ambulance, when a blast of light erupted, slamming into the roof inches from the lift opening. The concussion of the blast stunned her, seemed to knock the breath from her lungs.

It didn’t have the same effect, or even nearly that effect, on the three men. The man still holding her yanked her off her feet and charged off the lift directly behind the other two. Contrary to what she might have expected if she’d had her wits about her, the blond did
not
toss his burden aside. Instead, he ran full tilt toward the gangway as if the thing weighed no more than a feather. The brunette dragged a laser pistol from the holster strapped to his leg and returned fire as the man holding her charged past, also firing with his free hand as he raced toward the cruiser with her under one arm as if
she
was no more than a feather. He wasn’t even winded when he’d raced up the gangway and deposited her none too gently into a seat.

Stunned, expecting any moment to feel her body disintegrate along with the ship around her, Bronte’s gaze followed instinctively as the man raced to the control console, working the controls so quickly his hands were little more than a blur of movement even before he dropped into the seat beside the blond. An explosion rocked the ship, effectively diverting Bronte. Gripping the arms of the chair she’d been dropped into, her head swiveled of its own accord toward the deafening sound and the metallic pinging of flying metal. She was just in time to see the brunette land flatfooted on the deck, slamming a hand against the control that lifted the gangway and sealed the hatch.

Without comprehension, she stared at the now ragged uniform he wore, taking in the gashes along his arm and leg and the blackened, gaping flesh where lasers had torn into him. There was little blood. Lasers tended to seal the flesh and veins even as they burned through them. What caught her attention and held it, though, was the gleaming metal, not bone, exposed by the wounds.

She was still staring at the metal, trying to wrap her mind around everything that had happened and the implications of seeing metal rather than charred bone, when the man stalked up to her, grasped the restraints she hadn’t had the wit to fasten and quickly fastened her in. He’d barely done so when the craft shot from the roof like a launched missile, plastering her to the back of her seat.

The man grabbed her seat back to keep from being pitched toward the rear of the ship. The metal groaned, as if it was about to be ripped loose from its mooring, but, thankfully, held as he launched himself across the aisle and managed to land in the seat apparently reserved for him.

That feat shocked her almost as much as everything that had gone before. She couldn’t begin to guess how many G’s the ship was pulling in its almost vertical climb, but she knew it would take superhuman strength to combat it.

Any man, no matter if he was built like a tank, as this one was, would have been plastered against the bulkhead at the rear of the cockpit.

The truth, despite the implications, was slow in coming simply because of the shock and her absolute unwillingness to accept what her senses told her.

No wonder, she thought, feeling faint and cold with sudden terror, these men were such marvels of perfection, so perfectly wonderful and beautiful if every way. They weren’t
men
at all! They were rogue cyborgs … and she’d just spent the last fifteen minutes convincing them that they should kidnap
her
instead of looking for a doctor that was more experienced!

Chapter Two

Two concussions rocked the ship in rapid succession. Bronte squeezed her eyes closed, praying the shields would hold, bartering with fate for all she worth. Abruptly, the pull against her ceased. For a handful of seconds, she felt weightless and then the artificial gravity kicked in sluggishly, either because the two men … cyborgs … manning the controls were too preoccupied with trying to outmaneuver the ship or ships trailing them and trying their best to blast them out of the sky, or because one of the military cruisers had managed to damage some of the controls.

She knew that had to be who was firing on them … the military … or maybe the police … someone who was actually
supposed
to be on her side. She couldn’t bring herself to root for them, however, not when she was going to be a piece of the debris if they succeeded in bringing down the cyborg craft.

The stars visible in the forward facing screens above the pilots blurred. Freed from the pull of the Earth’s gravity, Bronte groped for the glasses she habitually perched on top of her head when she wasn’t using them. She found them dangling by one arm on the side of her head, tangled in her hair, which was the only reason, she realized, that she still had them. She discovered, though, when she’d managed to disentangle the glasses from her hair and perch them on her nose that the stars were still blurred. She couldn’t feel the pull she would have felt if she’d still been caught in the pull of Earth’s gravity, but she realized they’d jumped into hyper-drive.

It boggled her mind. It probably boggled the minds of those trailing them, as well. This craft shouldn’t have had that capability.

No human craft would have.

She wasn’t on a craft designed and built by humans, though. If she hadn’t already guessed as much, the technology was enough to clinch the matter.

And it still stunned her. How, she wondered, could manmade machines develop technology beyond the capabilities of their creators?

But it
had
to have been them, unless they’d discovered alien technology.

The blurring of the stars lessened after a short time, the streaks shortening and finally disappearing altogether. When it did, though, she saw that the millions of bright lights had dwindled to no more than a sprinkling of pinpoints of light and a vast amount of velvety darkness.

The black haired giant tossed off his harness and stood. As he turned in her direction she saw that he, too, had been wounded in the attempt. A foot long gash crossed his chest from the upper slope of one pec almost to the point near his opposite hip where her head had been when he’d dashed to the ship with her. Her belly clenched when she realized how closely she’d come to having her brains splattered all over him. Then, too, despite her certainty that he had to be a machine, the wound looked so painful she couldn’t help but feel a twinge of empathetic pain in her belly.

His face, she saw when she looked up at him as he approached her, was taut—not creased with pain, but the very fact that it was rigid seemed to indicate an inner struggle with pain.

He didn’t look at her. Instead, he looked the man beside her over and nodded toward the back of the ship. The wounds were really beyond her experience—she was no surgeon and besides that knew nothing about cyborgs beyond the fact that they were machines ‘clothed’ in human tissue. Beyond that, they had kidnapped her and she had no idea what their intentions were toward her. Still, her healer’s instincts rose to the forefront. “I should attend your wounds,” she said a little shakily.

Both men turned to look at her and she found herself pinned by a pair of piercing, pale blue eyes and an equally penetrating pair of emerald green eyes.

In fact, she sensed the blond, still at the control of the vessel, had also turned at the sound of her voice.

The one with black hair tilted his head at her, almost curiously, though she could not see it in his expression. After a moment, he slid a look at the man still seated. “It should be obvious to you now that our experience with the ‘tender mercies’ of humans have given us no reason to trust them.”

Bronte flinched inwardly. As caught up as she was in her own life, as little as she noticed about the world outside her personal sphere, she knew very well that the cyborgs had gone rogue and the company that had manufactured them had recalled them for destruction … or at least attempted to. It wasn’t general knowledge, though, because it was something the company had tried very hard to keep from the public. The only reason she knew anything at all about it was because she had a colleague, a former classmate that she had maintained some friendly relations with, that had inadvertently let just enough classified information slip that she’d pieced the story together from the occasional news vids she managed to catch.

She was, in fact, distressed that he had so blatantly pointed out that he was a cyborg. She would have far preferred it if he’d maintained the illusion, or tried to, that she had been kidnapped by humans. If he wasn’t worried about her having the knowledge it did not bode well for her.

She felt the blood flee from her face in a rush that made her dizzy. Swallowing with an effort against the knot of uneasiness that formed in her throat, she struggled to find her voice. “You must have some use for me,” she managed to say, “if you risked … capture to take me.”

His gaze flickered over her face. “But then, again, we are only machines, incapable of fear, pain … anxiety....” He paused for a long, long moment. “Desire.”

A tide of warmth flooded through her at the single word, made significant both by the pause that went before and the deep, almost husky inflection of his voice. Dismayed by her body’s instinctive reaction, Bronte said no more as he moved past her at last and the other cyborg removed his harnesses, rose, and followed him.

When Bronte glanced toward the man at the controls of the ship, she saw that he was still studying her. He met her gaze for a long moment and finally turned away.