Cyborg Nation Read online

  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 h
er, 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.

  Released, Bronte drew a shuddering breath into her burning lungs, unconscious of the fact, until that moment, that she’d been holding her breath. She’d been dismissed, very coolly at that. She sat staring at the view beyond the ship for some time, trying to marshal her scattered wits. Why, she wondered, had they taken her when they appeared not only to have no use of her services, but no trust or liking for humans in general?

  She frowned at that. Liking, or disliking, were emotions. He’d pointed out the obvious, that they were machines and had no ability to feel as their creators did. And yet she wasn’t entirely comfortable with that conclusion. Maybe it was just that they seemed so human-like that she expected them to behave like humans? Then again, they had been designed to blend with humanity, to interact with them, because humans weren’t comfortable being around great, hulking, powerful machines that utilized artificial intelligence.

  Some of the older models, which had merely been humanoid in design, had been just plain scary. The manufactures had discovered they were never going to fill every household with two or three if they looked so ‘threatening’, which was why they’d really gone overboard changing the whole look of the robot, not only making them appear so human-like that they blended seamlessly with the population, but making them feel human, as well, so that they’d found a whole new market for them as sex toys.

  As that thought congealed in her mind, Bronte wondered abruptly if these had been designed specifically as human sexual companions. She couldn’t prevent either the blush or the heat that rose inside of her as it dawned on her that she was already well aware that they were anatomically correct … which seemed to support that theory. And yet, if that was the case, why had they been built like … soldiers? Maybe they--the company--had merely figured one design would do, at least in the sense of making them multi-purpose so that the model worked equally well for either job?

  That seemed likely. Why go to the expense of building a dozen different models for different jobs when they could build one to do any job the customer might want?

  Could they all be the same model, though, when they looked as distinctly different as three different, unrelated humans would look?

  Why did that matter, she thought abruptly?

  It didn’t because it had no bearing on her situation that she could see.

  They had a use for her. They must. There was no reason in the world for them to seek her out, and they obviously had, unless they did have some use for her. She could understand a drive in them to destroy the people they knew were hell bent on destroying them. They didn’t actually need anything more than a will to exist--and obviously they did have that—and a firm grasp on logic to realize that they must eliminate the threat to their existence in order to continue. But she was no threat to them. She was a doctor. She had never worked for the company in any way, shape, or form.

  Besides, it would have been easy to kill her if that had been the objective. They’d caught her completely by surprise. One of them could have snapped her like a twig before she could have even gotten out a cry for help.

  Without consciously coming to a decision, Bronte unfastened her safety harness and rose a little unsteadily. The blond cyborg turned to look at her, but he neither said anything nor made any attempt to stop her as she headed from the cockpit in search of the injured cyborgs. It wasn’t hard to find them. The ship was designed as a short range ‘hopper’, or at least in the vein of those crafts that had no need for a good deal of space. Beyond the main cabin/cockpit area, there was a small food preparation/eating area, a bathroom, or ‘head’, and beyond that only a single cabin. Bronte froze in the doorway once the hatch/door had opened.

  Both men were stark naked and she’d never in her life seen that much naked male flesh. Prod her mind though she would to accept ‘cyborg’, her brain refused to give the lie to what her eyes saw. The one with black hair turned to stare at her. The other one glanced at her, but he was intent on cutting the charred flesh from the other man’s wound. Blood dripped from his hands, effectively distracting Bronte. Her belly clenched.

  “What are you doing?” she gasped, surging forward.

  “The laser cauterizes as it cuts,” the patient, or ‘victim’ said through clenched teeth. “The flesh can not mend together as is.”

  Bronte didn’t realize she’d grabbed the hand of the cyborg cutting until his hand stilled beneath hers. “You can’t just … filet his entire chest and torso! He’ll lose too much blood … especially at the rate you’re going. To say nothing of the fact that it’ll leave a horrible scar! What did you use to deaden it? What do you have to close the wound with?

  “You,” she said to the brunette, “move. You,” she added, grasping the other man’s hand, “sit down before you fall down and break something.”

  Neither man moved and Bronte quickly discovered she couldn’t budge either one so much as a hair. Finally, the dark man nodded. He sank heavily onto the bunk when the brunette moved away, placing the scalpel he held in Bronte’s outstretched, demanding, hand. “I need antiseptic, something to deaden the area, something to close the wound, and sterile gauze,” she said absently.

  The brunette got up. Her conscience smote her. He was wounded, too, but then she didn’t know where anything was and she needed to close the chest wound as quickly as possible to stop the bleeding. The brunette returned after a few moments, settling her bag of medical instruments—her bag—on the bunk beside them. Her files and now her bag, too? Had they taken everything from her office? She flicked a censorious glance at him, but she was relieved, too. She knew she would find everything she needed inside.

  “You need only to cut the dead flesh and close the wound,” the man she was working on said, his voice harsh. She didn’t doubt pain had a lot to do with the roughness. She flicked a glance at him as she moved between his thighs and bent over to examine the upper area of the wound. “Maybe you actually like pa
in, but I don’t like inflicting it. I’ll feel better if I deaden the area, and I’ll certainly feel better making sure it isn’t likely to get infected,” she added as she disinfected her hands with the solution she unearthed from her bag.

  To her surprise, his lips curled in the faintest of smiles. Amusement gleamed in his eyes. It disappeared so quickly, though, she wondered if she’d only imagined it. “I am a machine,” he growled.

  “Meaning you feel no pain?”

  He neither denied it nor admitted it.

  “Liar,” she said softly and then felt a chilling rush at her unthinking remark, wondering if it would anger him. “What’s your name?” she added quickly to change the direction of his thoughts.

  “Why would you think a machine would have a name … beyond its function … cyborg?”

  Bronte sucked her lower lip into her mouth uneasily, but she felt a pang of empathy, too. She had gone into medicine as much because she felt a need to soothe the hurt and heal the sick as to impress the father she had admired so much, but there were times when she thought it was a mistake, that she was not cut out for this business of trying to heal. She felt the pain of others too deeply, and her instincts told her, whatever he had begun life as, he hurt, deeply, because his existence as a living, breathing, thinking being had been denied by his creators.

  Her hand was shaking as she finished trimming and cleansing the wound along his breast. Lifting a hand, she brushed the beads of sweat from her brow and the hair that had clung to the dampness. After trying unsuccessfully to hold the wound closed and use the instrument to seal the flesh together, she reached down to catch his hands and had him press the wound closed. “I’m not your enemy,” she said quietly.

  “You are human,” he pointed out.

  She paused, staring at him in dismay. “So I can not be anything else?”

  His gaze flickered over her as she stood between his thighs, leaning over him. His gaze lingered on her breasts for a long moment. The faint smile curled his lips again. “I am a superior model … designed to kill quickly and efficiently. But I was programmed to be a pleasure bot, as well. If you have a need …?”