Cyborg (15 page)

Amaryllis landed on top. Even as she scrambled to regain her footing, however, she felt hard fingers digging into her hair. Fire flooded her scalp as she was dragged upward by her hair. She swung blindly at the new threat. Her arm was caught and twisted behind her back so hard she thought for several moments the joints would separate.“Cease!”

The roared command jerked her out of the haze of battle. Gritting her teeth, Amaryllis subsided, dividing a glare between the two cyborgs that held her.

If she’d had any doubts about the barracks being watched, the guards surrounding both her and Violet dispelled them.

Without a word, the cyborgs marched her and Violet from the barracks and into the corridor.

The brig was in the bowels of the ship. Amayllis had thought the barracks was up until that point.

Not surprisingly, it was full. Embarrassment filled her as she was marched down the main corridor and finally shoved into a small cell. Violet was pushed into a cell opposite hers.

They glared at each other for several moments before Amaryllis finally turned and surveyed her accommodations.

It wasn’t a hell of a lot worse than the barracks.

Shrugging, she plopped down on the narrow bunk and braced her back against the wall that separated her from the next cell.

“Are you injured?”

Amaryllis rolled her eyes. It was Reese’s voice.

Just her shit house luck to be bunked right next to him. Apparently the gang was all here.“I’m fine,” she said through gritted teeth.

“What happened?”

She wasn’t about to admit to anything so shameful as having been dragged into fighting over a man. “I had a difference of opinion with Violet--that dainty little flower sitting in the cell across from me.”

He was silent for several moments and she had the uncomfortable feeling that he knew exactly why Violet had attacked her. “We need to talk.”

Instantly visions of the last ‘discussion’ she’d had with Reese filled her mind.

She covered her face with her hands, feeling a rush of both embarrassment and desire, but a hysterical urge to giggle swelled in her chest, as well. She’d spent years suffering agonies of envy of all the girls who’d had boyfriends, certain she never would, and now she had three bull headed, absolutely single minded cyborgs chasing after her like she was some sort of sex goddess or something. “I think it’s going to be a little difficult to carry on a ‘discussion’ under present circumstances.”

To her surprise, he immediately grasped the innuendo. From the tone of his voice, he wasn’t particularly happy that she’d brought it up. “I meant talk,” he said tightly.

“I don’t particularly want to talk--to you or anyone else.”

The silence lasted longer that time. “You’ve chosen Cain?”

The question and the inflexion of his voice spurred a riot of emotions, making her heart tighten painfully in her chest and she realized a number of very unpalatable facts all at once.As appalled as she was to find herself lusting over Reese, Dante, and Cain all at the same time, she had far more to worry about than lust. She wasn’t over her crush on Reese, not by a long shot, and she felt just as distressed over the idea of choosing Reese over Cain, or either one of them over Dante. She didn’t want to do it. She didn’t think she could. No matter which she chose, she would have a lot of regrets to live with, more than she wanted to face.

And she would have to. No matter whether there were hundreds, or thousands of cyborgs awaiting them on the cyborg planet, it would still be a small community and that meant she’d be running into one or the other of them all the time.

“I chose my life already when I decided to become a soldier. I’m not cut out for anything else. I don’t want anything else,” she lied. The truth was, she did. She wanted a life like her parents had had. She wanted to be ‘normal’. It was all she’d ever really wanted and the one thing she could never have.

Maybe fate had dropped her right where she belonged, a misfit in the midst of other misfits, and yet even among them she didn’t quite fit. The hunters differed from the cyborgs but they still shared the bond of being the same as each other. Despite their own varying physical attributes, the cyborgs shared the bond of having been created the same.

She was still different and, beyond her mixed feelings about considering forming a family unit, she was still afraid she would never truly fit in. Both Dante and Reese already knew she was different. How long before everyone else realized it, as well? And, once they had, even supposing they decided to allow her to live among them, they would know she was different and she would be able to feel them staring at her where ever she went and know she was being judged, hated for being different.

“We have a standing army. You needn’t give that up if it’s what you want. You would still be allowed to form a family unit.”

Surprise flickered through Amaryllis briefly, but she wasn’t particularly pleased by the information when she’d expected that to settle the matter. She decided to try a different tact.

“You would be more … content with someone who has more interest in forming a family unit than I.”

“One of my own kind, you mean?” he asked in a harsh whisper.

Touchy. She hadn’t realized he would be so touchy about it. The anger in his voice unsettled her and riled her own anger. “I don’t know why you think you want me anyway. You’ve hardly spoken to me in all the time we’ve worked together. Why the sudden interest?”

He was silent so long she’d decided he couldn’t come up with a convincing lie.

“I was … afraid.”

The comment startled her. It also completely caught her attention. “Why?” she asked, genuinely confused.

He seemed to wrestle with himself for several moments. “Could we discuss this when we have no audience?”

He had a point. They didn’t have any privacy, and yet she could hear the others who’d been confined talking. She couldn’t think they had a great deal of interest in her conversation. Finally, she got up and moved to the front of the cell. “Why?” she demanded, pressing her face to the bars so that she could see him in the next cell.

He scrubbed a hand over his face. “It was forbidden.”

Her lips flattened. “Sex was forbidden. We could’ve been friends.”

“I do not want to be your friend,” he said harshly. “And I could not take a chance that I would be tempted to do something that would make them suspicious of me. It seemed … safer to keep my distance.”

Amaryllis frowned. “You were afraid you’d blow your cover? Or that they’d reprimand you with brig time so that you couldn’t spy for the cyborgs?”

“I was afraid they would separate us so that I could not protect you,” he growled irritably. “And….”

Amaryllis didn’t know whether to be insulted or flattered. She supposed she was a little of both. She’d assumed Reese had been so protective because he’d been under orders to watch her closely and she’d resented it.

It was still insulting that he’d considered her incapable of taking care of herself.

“And?”He sighed. “I was … uncertain.”

Amaryllis frowned. “Uncertain of what?”

He made a sound of impatience. “I was not programmed in the way to entice a female for the purpose of mating. I do not know how. I thought … I had planned to have that programming added,” he finished uncomfortably.

Amaryllis bit her lip, torn between the urge to giggle and the desire to comfort.

“You did … very well with the sex,” she finally offered.

Instead of seeming pleased, he looked frustrated. “I could not have or you would have known that I was making love to you,” he said stiffly. “And you would not have allowed that …
hunter
to touch you.”

Guilt swamped Amaryllis. She resented feeling it. Nobody owned her. She wasn’t bound by any oath, or any contract. She had a perfect right to enjoy sex, or flirtation, with anybody she wanted to.

She didn’t want to hurt anyone, however, especially someone she cared for, and it sounded to her as if Reese was saying he was hurt by it.

Warmth spread through her, hopefulness that he actually felt something for her besides desire. Desire was good, and she wasn’t unappreciative, even if it didn’t necessarily follow that it was particularly personal. If he actually cared, though, and not merely in the sense that he believed he’d ‘marked’ his territory and had ownership rights….There was something that didn’t quite fit, though.

“You weren’t jealous of Dante,” she pointed out hesitantly, remembering almost the moment she questioned it that he’d actually seemed pretty pissed off when he’d found her in Dante’s cabin, reeking of sex.

He seemed to wrestle with himself, but in the end he neither admitted nor denied the accusation. “He did not know that I wanted you for myself.”

Amaryllis thought that over and realized he was trying to make excuses for his brother.“Besides, if I had done what I wanted to, I would have been here, while you were there.” She hid a smile. It was as much of an admission as he was likely to make. He
was
jealous. He was still ruled more by logic than emotion, though, or he wouldn’t have considered the consequences until
after
he’d made his peace with his brother.

That wasn’t such a bad thing, was it?

There was a lot to be said for having enough self control to think things through before acting.

She shook her head at the direction of her thoughts, realizing she was actually entertaining the thought of accepting Reese’s offer. It was insane even to consider it and not because of any prejudice about him being a cyborg. He was right. He was as human as she was, however he’d been created.

The thing was, he was no more cut out for forming an alliance than she was.

Whatever he wanted, or believed he wanted, he’d been designed strictly as a killing machine. Maybe he was right and it would take no more than additional programming to fix that little problem, but she had her doubts that anything could completely overcome his previous programming and it was out of the question even to think about complete reprogramming. He wouldn’t be the same person and she adored the person he was.

“We will talk when we reach Gallen.”

“Gallen?”

“Home.”

The single word raised a plethora of feelings, but yearning was uppermost … for her own home, for her mother. She wished desperately that she could seek her mother’s advice, but then it occurred to her that her mother would probably think she was a basket case even to consider having a serious relationship with a cyborg.

She wouldn’t understand that Reese was a person, not a machine.

It was as well that Reese thought it best to hold the discussion until they reached the world the cyborgs called home. It would give her time to learn what if any options she had and to decide what she really wanted to do.

She didn’t know whether to be relieved or sorry when she discovered she needn’t worry that Reese would change his mind and try to press her for an answer. The guards arrived later that evening and moved him to another cell further along the corridor. Six dreary days later, she was released from lock up. The day after that, they landed.

Amaryllis was almost as terrified as she was excited at the prospect of being off ship after months in space.

No one else seemed to share her reservations. When the order came to disembark, the corridor flooded with eager ‘colonists’ of both the hunter and the cyborg variety, although Amaryllis supposed they were all cyborgs now.

Or maybe they’d decided to call themselves something else? She thought a little hysterically.

She was pregnant.

She figured that was reason enough to be battling hysteria even if she wasn’t facing a world she was fairly certain she wasn’t prepared for.

She was still in a state of shock over the realization, still unable to completely accept her suspicions.

She didn’t have to look far for the source, but she still had a hard time accepting that she’d been impregnated by a cyborg.

How had they developed the capability? She knew damn well The Company would have made certain they couldn’t reproduce, regardless of the other liberties they’d taken and despite the fact that they’d deliberately developed a human/robotic hybrid.

Did it matter now?

She’d been trying to deny it for weeks, ignoring all the changes in her body that told its own story. She’d almost managed to convince herself that it was pure imagination. After all, she’d never been pregnant before. It seemed more likely that her suspicions could be wrong than that she’d hit on just why she didn’t feel quite as she should. Right? But she knew she could continue trying to deny it until the baby--or whatever it was--was born, and it wasn’t going to change a damn thing. Denial wasn’t going to stop it from happening.

It could’ve been either one of them.

It could’ve been both for all she knew.

She didn’t care. All that mattered was that she was almost certain she had something growing inside of her and she didn’t want it there.

She couldn’t face producing a freak.

She wasn’t about to bring something into the world to go through the hell she’d gone through.

Her parents had always said it was the radiation storms, that they’d had inadequate shielding at a critical time in her development. There’d been a time when she’d believed them, but that was before she’d been facing the possibility of producing some ‘thing’

herself.And if that wasn’t bad enough, she’d mated with a cyborg. They’d been engineered for excellence, but there had been no expectation that they would reproduce and therefore no concern that their genes could affect future generations. His genes could be as fucked up as her own probably were.

She wanted, desperately, to find a physician who could tell her just how bad it was and remove it if it was as she suspected. She knew that was impossible though. They’d know inside of five minutes that she wasn’t one of them and who knew what would happen?Her only hope, as far as she could see, was to get on an outbound ship as soon as possible and find help.