Cyborg (3 page)

The incident between them on the trip out had seemed to support her wishful thinking.She’d woken from one of her brief rest periods to find herself virtually nose to nose with Reese on the bunk in one of the cabins, so close she could feel the warmth of his breath caressing her, could feel her body responding to his nearness and his scent.

He wasn’t asleep. He was staring at her in a way that had made her belly clench.

When his gaze had strayed to her lips and lingered there for a handful of heartbeats, she’d thought that he would kiss her. She’d desperately wanted to feel that hard mouth covering hers, to tear his control from him and feel his heated possession. Instead, after several shuddering heartbeats, he’d seemed to collect himself and had rolled away from her, exerting, once more, his supreme control over himself.

But that presupposed that he was human and capable of feeling human emotion, of experiencing the throes of passion. Maybe what she saw was all there was? Maybe it had only been her imagination playing tricks on her when she’d thought he wanted to kiss her, to make love to her, as badly as she wanted him to, her own desires controlling her mind? Maybe he was nothing more than a machine, incapable even of curiosity?

“You believe them?”

It wasn’t a question, not really. Amaryllis’ gaze skidded away from making eye contact even as she glanced toward him. “They seem to believe it--unless they’ve evolved to the point that they’re capable of lying. But then The Company has assured us they aren’t capable of evolving, that it’s only faulty programming that makes them behave as they do.”

He merely grunted. The sound could’ve indicated agreement, disgust--any number of things. It seemed like a purely human reaction, but Amaryllis felt as if she’d been drugged, as if she was caught up in some sort of bizarre hallucination.

She refused to allow herself to dwell on the fact that she was, quite possibly, the only human on this world, surrounded by cyborgs who despised the race that had created them. To allow it would be to allow terror to seep through her veins like a corrosive acid and the one thing she was certain of was that she couldn’t afford to fall apart. Her chances of survival might be slim anyway, but she had no desire to let go of a slim chance for none at all.

It was almost a relief when the cyborgs began to move among them. The fact that they singled out the injured seemed to indicate they had meant what they’d said.

Extermination would not be immediately forthcoming.

It would’ve been more of a relief if Amaryllis hadn’t feared the treatment itself would expose her. She’d been debating the matter and what her chances were for some moments when a shadow fell across her. Her heart seized immediately, as if a fist had closed around it. “I’m fine,” she said without looking up, her teeth clenched to keep them from chattering with reaction.

“You are injured.”

“Not seriously.”

“I’ve checked her myself. She has superficial wounds only.”

Both surprise and relief flickered through Amaryllis at Reese’s unexpected championship. It was short lived. Even as she glanced toward him, she sensed the cyborg kneeling on her other side to examine her more closely. Her tongue clove to the roof of her mouth when she glanced toward him.

He was as dark as Reese was fair, and somewhat slighter of build, but his face was so similar they might have been cast from the same mold--so to speak. Nausea swam through her as the thread of doubt she’d been nursing vanished. If they weren’t brothers--and she knew they couldn’t be--then they’d certainly been developed from the same gene donor cocktail. She jumped when the cyborg tucked a finger beneath her chin and tilted her head, examining her closely.

After a moment, the cyborg’s gaze moved from her to Reese. “She has head injuries. It can not hurt to have her examined.”

Reese’s hard mouth tightened into a thin, uncompromising line. “She has displayed no symptoms suggesting serious damage. She is cut and battered, but sound enough to need no treatment.”

The cyborg’s lips tightened in response to the challenge in Reese’s words.

Abruptly, he rose to his full height, pulling Amaryllis to her feet. “Nevertheless, she will be examined.”

Reese stood, his manner challenging.

A battle seemed imminent. Moreover, they were attracting attention Amaryllis didn’t care for. “I’ll go,” she put in quickly. It wasn’t as if she was going to be able to avoid it at this point. She could only try, once she was there, to convince them she needed no internal examination--and hope for the best if they insisted upon it.

She’d never considered that the day might come when she would be grateful for the birth defects that had required so much reconstruction to make her ‘whole’. Now she mentally calculated her chances of survival because of it as actually fair.

The planet her parents had been terra farming had, unknown to everyone except, perhaps, The Company, been regularly bombarded by radiation that had proven disastrous to developing fetuses. There was the unsaid accusation that the colonists had had no business breeding naturally anyway, but they’d certainly paid for it. Most of the pregnancies had ended in miscarriage. The few, like herself, who’d been born alive had been armless and legless, among other even more horrible deformities. She’d almost reached puberty before her parents had managed to save enough credits for corrective surgery. Fortunately, she hadn’t grown a great deal or she might have had to endure even more. As it was, the cybernetic arms and legs she’d been fitted with had had to be replaced twice to keep them in proportion to her body’s growth. Internally, her skeletal structure had had to be reinforced--an excruciatingly painful process--with metals to support the weight of her robotic limbs and a chip had had to be implanted in her brain to enable her to control them.

Her internal organs were her own, except for the biological replacement organs for those that had failed her, but then she knew that the cyborgs also had bio-engineered organs.As far as she could see, all she really had to worry about was her reproductive organs which the cyborgs, naturally enough, would not have been given, and the chip in her brain, which would not match the internal CPU the cyborgs had.

Both men--both cyborgs--looked down at her with nearly identical expressions of surprise, irritation and, faintly, amusement.

Reese shook his head ever so slightly. “It isn’t necessary.”

Amaryllis had the unnerving feeling that the comment and the look in his eyes were a warning. Had he done a background check on her, as well? Was it possible that he
knew
that she was human? “But it is inevitable,” she responded. “We’re captives, outnumbered, with no means of escape. I see no choice but to do as our captors demand.”

To her relief, Reese desisted, bowing to the inevitable as she had.

The cyborg did not release her. She wasn’t certain whether the hand on her arm was for support, or to establish his control, but it nixed the budding hope that she might have the chance to make a break for it before she was discovered. “I can walk unassisted,” she said coldly.

He ignored the comment.

Angry and frightened, Amaryllis focused her attention on keeping step with him for several moments. She was a trained soldier, however, and despite her fear, she began to assess her situation almost unconsciously.

The planet they found themselves on had little to recommend it beyond breathable air--the cyborgs required that as well as she did since they were not mere machines, but biological hybrids, and human biology required air, water, sustenance.

Almost as if on cue, her stomach growled. She wasn’t unduly self-conscious. Her life had not allowed for a great deal of modesty or privacy and if she’d ever been squeamish about such things it had been leached from her through the years that had brought her to her current situation. Years of undergoing medical treatment and surgery to correct her birth defects and being poked, prodded and dissected by doctors, nurses and orderlies, followed by the years of training and work in her chosen field--the militia--had not allowed for self-consciousness in very many areas.

She somehow doubted, however, that cyborgs actually experienced hunger pangs that vocalized.

She had no doubt that he’d heard it, though, for he glanced at her sharply.

“What is this place?” she asked, more to distract him than because she had any real interest in it. “Not the cyborg stronghold as we’d supposed, I guess?”

“No.”

She wasn’t surprised that he seemed disinclined to chat, but it irritated her that he was so resistant to her efforts to distract him. “A trap, then?”

“Yes.”

Amaryllis studied the crude huts that made up the ‘village’ the cyborgs had built to complete their illusion. Most of the ‘props’ were in shambles now, and she hadn’t had a view of the compound before, or during, the attack, but from what she could see she wondered why their leaders had fallen for it at all. The carelessness of the construction should have been a dead giveaway in her book, but then they’d always had the tendency to have their head up their asses where the cyborgs were concerned. The company had
really
underestimated them this time. “Why not simply kill us?”

The cyborg lifted one dark brow. Finally, he shrugged, as if he wasn’t in total agreement with the decision that had been made but had accepted it. “We are the same.

We wanted you to join us in building our own world … free from persecution by humans.

Contrary to what the company has led you to believe, we have no desire to subjugate mankind. We only wish to live our lives as we choose.”

Amaryllis’ throat went dry. She debated for several moments, wondering whether it would seem less suspicious if she refused to accept their insistence that both hunter and hunted were cyborg, or if it was even safe to claim her humanity under the circumstances.

She finally decided that she just wasn’t comfortable insisting that she was not cyborg when she had no idea what the consequences might be to the discovery that she actually wasn’t. “Why?”

He stopped, tilting his head slightly. A slow smile curled his lips. Amusement gleamed in his dark eyes and something indefinable curled in her belly in response. “We had few women.”

Amaryllis’ knees went weak at the wealth of implications in that one, simple statement. A heated blush suffused her cheeks as her mind instantly leapt to what use the cyborgs might have for women.

It was absurd, of course. The cyborgs were imitations of human life, but imitation was a key word. They had been programmed to mimic human behavior and even some emotions, but they only appeared to experience emotion. They didn’t actually feel as human beings did, and they could not experience desire--or anything else for that matter.

She didn’t particularly care for the trend of her thoughts anyway. He was a design of sheer perfection, a gorgeous machine, but he
was
a machine. Thinking of desire and this replica of a human being in the same context was nearly as insane as lusting over a toaster.She finally decided that it was shock and confusion. She’d been lusting over Reese from the moment he was assigned to work with her--from the moment she’d first set eyes on him, to be truthful. She’d believed Reese was as human as she was--which was now up for debate and only added to her confusion--but there was no excuse for transferring those feelings to this cyborg, however much he reminded her of Reese. “Uh.

I don’t think I follow.”

He lifted his dark brows, and then frowned, as if working through an internal debate. Or perhaps it wasn’t that at all. Maybe he was only waiting for the noise of the arrival to subside before he spoke again, for the sound of an arriving craft caught their attention at that moment. They watched as a huge, deep space trawler settled slowly to the ground a short distance away, its engines kicking up a cloud of debris. Once it had settled and the engines were killed, a gang plank was lowered and the cyborgs leading or carrying the injured began to move toward it.

“It is not enough to simply form a world for ourselves. We need purpose, a future. We want mates--offspring.”

Amaryllis blinked several times, rapidly, as a new wave of shock washed over her.

“Offspring?”

“Families.”

Amaryllis felt her jaw go slack with stunned surprise. “But you … I mean, if we’re cyborgs, we can’t … couldn’t … uh … wouldn’t be able to reproduce,” she said a little weakly, trying to shove the implications to the back of her mind. The inner voice refused to be silenced, however.

Never, in her wildest imaginings would she have considered what the true purpose of this mission appeared to be--not the utter defeat of the hunters that had been dogging them for years, but the capture of--mates for the purpose of colonization.

The ship the cyborg led Amaryllis into was a modified commercial freighter.

Under the circumstances, one wouldn’t expect luxury. It was as well she hadn’t, for the ship looked more like some medieval dungeon than a passenger craft, even of the lowest order. Amaryllis’ tension built as it slowly, but inevitably, sank in upon her that nothing short of a suicidal attempt would win her more than a few moments of freedom. Even the sliver of a chance vanished as the cyborg forced her up the gangway and into the freighter, towing her along one dimly lit, dank passageway after another until at last they reached a large cabin that had been converted into a sickbay. It was already beginning to fill with the injured and the medics attending them. After leading her to a gurney, the cyborg ordered her to undress and climb onto it.

As stunned as she was by everything else that had happened, Amaryllis felt still another jolt. “
You’re
going to examine me?”

He eyed her speculatively. “You would prefer another?” he responded coolly.

“I’d prefer a medic,” Amaryllis said tartly.

“I have the programming needed.”

There didn’t seem much she could say to that. She didn’t know why she didn’t want him in particular to examine her. It shouldn’t have mattered one way or another.