Cyborg Nation by Kaitlyn O'Connor (english readers TXT) 📗

but wince inwardly as she surreptitiously studied his battered face and body. As badly as Gideon had looked, Gabriel looked worse, and his stiff movements certainly seemed to indicate that he felt a great deal worse. The healer in her chafed at doing nothing, but she knew there was really very little she could do for him. He couldn’t have broken bones—she was fairly certain—because he didn’t have any. Outside, he was flesh and blood. Internally—his skeletal system, anyway, was a metal alloy—the strongest and most lightweight known to man, and she doubted even one of them could bend, break, or dent it. He should not have had biological internal organs, but obviously did—She didn’t know if they’d been made that way—for some reason that defied logic—or if it was part of their evolution into a new life form—but this was certainly not the first time he’d gone a few rounds with Gideon and Jerico. They had nanos that healed them—and did a better, faster job of it than she could.

And she still ached with the need to nurture and comfort him.

There had been many times in her life before when the deep need she had to care for things had been contrary to her instinct for survival, but she thought this ranked among the highest. The broken winged eagle that she’d found when she’d been a little girl and been moved by her empathy for its suffering to help had tried to peck her eyes out before she could get away from it, had succeeded in giving her a number of scars on her head and arms and shoulders to remember the occasion.

The cyborgs, of course, had intelligence and the ability to reason the wild bird hadn’t, but it was the same situation, just many times worse—they were wild, untamed savages and far more dangerous than just about anything in the wilderness because they were also intelligent and able to reason.

This need she was becoming more and more aware of inside of her to empathize with them was bad enough given her status as prisoner and enemy—although she thought any reasoning person would have to accept that their treatment had given them more than enough cause to feel as they did. The nurturing thing was worse. She could not soothe these savage beasts with a gentle touch—or a good fuck! She hadn’t needed to overhear Jerico’s comments to know that Gideon was more unpredictable and irritable since they’d had sex than he had been before. The way he’d … mauled her after he’d beat the hell out of Jerico might have seemed wildly exciting at just that moment, but it was a clear indication of lack of self-control, and he’d had a lot more of that before.

Beyond that, everything she had overheard them say indicated that they had hatched some sort of plot against her. She couldn’t imagine what it might be when they discussed battle and strategic campaigns one moment, and courting and contracts and sex in the next breath. It didn’t make any sense to want any kind of contract with her that she could think of.

She almost wished they had just come right out in their usual blunt, completely tactless manner and told her what it was all about. Then she would at least know what it was they were after instead of having to worry and wonder, all the while knowing that the idiots thought they were waging guerrilla warfare on her.

If not for the fact that they could move like lightening when the mood struck them, and virtually soundlessly, she would never have believed they even had the capability of managing a sneak attack of any description.

Chapter Nine

The books the cyborgs had so thoughtfully captured when they took her turned out to be a godsend in several ways. One of the most significant and obvious was the fact that it was something to occupy the endless hours of space travel that could make a person go quietly insane from sheer boredom. There were research texts among them, though, that she found helpful in another way. She’d already read those pertaining specifically to her field—some twice or more times—but she liked to think she had a fairly wide interest in the world beyond her field and had books on many different subjects, many of which she had never quite gotten around to reading.

The volume on Psychology she’d bought fell somewhere between necessary research, entertainment, and curiosity. It wasn’t directly related to her field, but overlapped it to her mind since the mental health and development of her patients could directly affect their physical health. She had referenced it several times when she’d run across behavior in her patients that disturbed her, but it wasn’t a book she’d read cover to cover simply because she wasn’t qualified to practice in that area and she wasn’t comfortable trying to dabble in it. She had only used it a few times to try to understand certain behavioral patterns that she’d feared might indicate problems outside her ability to treat.

She had, in fact, forgotten it was part of her library until she ran across it, but it was her uneasiness about her shifting attitude toward her captors that prompted her to select it to see if she could learn anything helpful. Naturally enough, the focus was on child psychology and she hadn’t actually expected to find anything useful in the book when she’d abandoned her novel. There were several chapters, however, that gave her a good deal of food for thought.

She hadn’t been abused by her captors, either verbally or physically—not to her mind—and yet she saw a pattern in the discussion that was disturbingly familiar. In a sense it was brain washing, mental manipulation brought about by a combination of persuasion and fear, or reward and punishment, that made the victim begin to empathize with the person who was victimizing them and also made them eager to please so that they would receive the ‘reward’ for doing