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

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