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

He shifted his weight to one arm and then lifted his free hand to stroke it lightly over her shoulder and arm. “I like to hear you laugh, even if you are laughing at me because I am such an uncouth brute I do not know how I should act or the right things to say.”

Bronte’s amusement vanished. “Don’t think that, Gabriel—any of that.”

“It is alright.”

“It isn’t alright. You are not an uncouth brute and you … almost always say and do just the right thing. I only laughed because you were thinking of sex and we’re both half dead.”

“I was not thinking about sex.” He paused. “Only a little. I like this, too.”

“Good, because cuddling is all I can manage right now.”

“Cuddling?”

“Mmm,” she murmured drowsily. “It’s what a man and woman do when they want to be close but they aren’t having sex.”

“I like the sex, too.”

“I know,” Bronte murmured, curbing the urge to giggle.

She was half asleep by the time Gideon and Jerico returned. They set about making a fire at once but Bronte curled her fingers along Gabriel’s waist when he would’ve moved. He subsided and she felt guilty for holding on to him when she knew he was probably cramped from holding the same position for so long. She released her grip on him. “It’s alright. You should get up and check your wound.”

He ignored the suggestion, staying until Gideon and Jerico had built a small fire and begun to sort through the things they’d brought in search of food. “Go eat,” she said finally. “I know you’ve hardly eaten anything all day.”

He shifted far enough away to study her face, grazing her chapped lips with his thumb. “I will get you some water.”

She was thirsty, so thirsty she could barely gather any moisture into her mouth. She nodded, turning to watch the men as they prepared a meal and heated it. It was obvious this was something they weren’t unfamiliar with and for the first time she wondered about the life they’d led as soldiers. From what Gabriel had said, they’d had to huddle together to share warmth on more than one occasion. They must have taken part in the battle for Xeno-12, she realized abruptly—one of the most disastrous campaigns of the Hu-Sho Galaxy war.

She frowned as she tried to piece together what she remembered about that war, which had ended about the time she’d graduated, but she hadn’t really followed the news. It had seemed so far away, so unrelated to her life. She’d been too young, then, to care much about politics—she still avoided politics as much as possible, except now that she was older it was because she did care, but felt helpless to change anything.

She did remember hearing about the disaster on Xeno-12, though. The government had dropped almost a quarter of a million soldiers on that frozen world, ill equipped to start with, and then failed to get supplies to them. Almost half the soldiers had died before the supply ship finally arrived.

Even as carefully as she’d distanced herself from all the war talk, the criminal negligence of the government that had led to the deaths of so many hadn’t been something she could divorce herself from. And as disinterested as she was in politics in general, nobody had been able to ignore the riots of rage that followed when the news vids hit the airwaves.

That had been … years ago, though, at least ten, she thought, or maybe a little less than that? They wouldn’t have been old …. She broke off that thought as it hit her that they were cyborgs. They had probably been created for that war.

When, she wondered, had she stopped thinking of them as cyborgs at all? It wasn’t that she’d forgotten they were. It was simply that she’d accepted that they were and at the same time ceased to think of cyborgs in terms of machines created by man and begun to think of them only as men.

They were men, not machines. It didn’t matter how they’d come into existence.

“You were sent to Xeno-12,” she said.

Gideon lifted his head and stared at her for a long moment. “We were. It was the last campaign we fought as soldiers of the Confederation.”

When Bronte finally managed to drag her gaze from his, she saw that both Gabriel and Jerico were studying her, as well.

They must be wondering how she’d deduced they’d fought in that campaign.

Or maybe they were just wondering why she’d asked?

She averted her gaze after a moment, feeling—guilty, as if she was directly responsible for that horror. Maybe she was at that. Maybe everyone who did nothing was just as responsible as everyone who’d brought about that disaster? She supposed they were. She didn’t know what she might have done that might have effected the outcome but she should’ve tried. Everyone should’ve and if they had, maybe then they could have kept it from happening.

And maybe not. But she would at least be able to salve her conscience that she’d tried.

It wasn’t just the war that had caused riots across several galaxies. It was the war that had turned the cyborgs rogue—those who survived. There’d never been a public accounting of how many of them had died on Xeno-12, but if the confederation had dropped several hundred thousand soldiers, they’d dropped twice or three times that many cyborgs—at least.

Maybe there’d been something there, on Xeno-12, no one knew about? Some micro-organism that had infected the cyborgs and brought together just the right elements to set off evolution? There must have been something about the situation that had set off the change.

Or maybe it had been nothing more than a coincidence that it began on Xeno-12? Maybe it was something that had already begun when they’d been shipped out from the company to that wasteland?

It seemed unlikely anyone would ever know for certain, unless the designers had figured it out before they destroyed the recorded evidence of their complicity and set