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

the back of her mind at any time, and yet watching them go about their daily lives with the same focus on their personal concerns as the citizens in any other city she’d been lulled into a sense of only being a stranger in a new city, hadn’t felt like a complete outsider until now.

“How long after the first sound of the proximity alarm before the meteor struck?”

The question jolted Bronte out of her self-absorption and she looked at the man who’d asked the question wide-eyed for several moments while she scrambled to focus.

If he hadn’t been so scary looking, she thought he would’ve been very attractive—he was certainly handsome, but dark in a way that went beyond dangerous—which actually didn’t surprise her. He was a national hero to the cyborgs, high commander of their armed forces now—Reuel, the first to go rogue according to legend and the one who’d united the rogues and formed them into a fighting unit that could have wiped out the human race if he’d been so inclined.

It had to say a great deal for him that he’d led them here instead, far enough from the people that were their enemies to have a chance of peace since there was no chance of peaceful co-existence.

“I don’t have an internal clock,” she stammered, and then wished she hadn’t reminded them she wasn’t like they were. “But no more than a few moments, certainly. Gideon had only had time to ask the computer the direction and velocity when it hit.”

“There was no alarm prior to that?”

“No.”

“The alarm was disengaged.”

“Then, when it went off the one and only time, and that was to make it possible for Gideon and Gabriel and Jerico to communicate with one another.”

“Master Sergeant Caleb has reported to this committee that you stated the ship came under fire at the time it left Earth.”

Surprise flickered through her that he’d gone to them as he’d promised. She fought the urge to glance at him. “Yes.”

“But there was no damage?”

“Not that I was aware of,” Bronte said pointedly, resisting the urge to offer Caleb’s theory, hoping he’d done so when he mentioned it to them.

“But you believe there could have been?”

Bronte shrugged. “I’m a doctor not an engineer. All I know is that both explosions were very close and the concussions caused violent tremors in the ship.”

“Was there an attempt by the captain and crew to extort a commitment from you to contract with them on co-habitation?”

The man to Reuel’s right barked that question out at her, catching her so completely unguarded that she couldn’t prevent a rush of blood to her cheeks. “Not that I was aware of,” she lied. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t and yet she found she was extremely reluctant to discuss something that intimate and personal in such a setting.

“No promises? No threats? But they did discuss the possibility with you?”

Bronte’s stomach coiled into a knot and tried to strangle her as the one question she thought most critical was dropped in her lap. “They asked me if I would contract with them, promised all the sort of things men usually promise a woman, and I said yes. …. And we did contract,” she added.

She relaxed a little when they didn’t pursue it. Instead the man to Reuel’s left, the High Councilor, Damon, asked her to recount her capture and, when she’d finished, asked her to tell them about her captivity on board the ship.

She hadn’t anticipated the line of questioning and stumbled over her testimony because she wasn’t certain what to say that would make it sound as if they’d been doing what they were supposed to and at the same time unthreatening to her. They couldn’t have been ordered to hold her in a cell, she reasoned, because there wasn’t one, and yet she was uneasy about telling them she’d had the run of the ship from the beginning. She compromised by pointing out that she’d never been left alone, at any time.

Lie number two.

Kane, whom Caleb had said was the head of the Department of Socio-Economic development, went back to picking apart the claim that there’d been a contractual agreement between her and the crew, which led Bronte to hope that Gideon and the others had acknowledged the contract.

Assuming Caleb hadn’t also told them she’d said they were companions.

Reuel drew her back to the crash.

Damon followed by asking at what point she’d been informed of the reason she’d been taken.

They went round and round, jumping from one subject to another and then back again to ask her the same questions over and over, each time subtly changed, but still the same question until she began to wonder if they were even listening to her answers.

Caleb had warned her they would pick everything apart until they were certain they had the truth. She didn’t care if that was what they did because the truth was they hadn’t done anything wrong, but she was worried that the ‘truth’ they arrived at wouldn’t be the real truth.

And yet the longer they questioned her the more tired she was and the more unnerved and fearful until it became harder and harder to respond carefully and make certain that none of her answers could be twisted to mean something she hadn’t intended.

After hours of questioning, when she’d finally reached a point of exhaustion and shattered nerves that she couldn’t focus at all any more, they began to pelt her with one question after another so rapidly that she didn’t even have time to think of a response, let alone answer, before they hit her with another one. Terrified she’d say the wrong thing, she stopped answering at all, glancing from one man to another with each new question, but merely staring at him while she tried to formulate an answer.

“Why were you so distraught at the med center if you were not mistreated in captivity?”

“Why would you willingly agree to contract with your captors unless they had threatened you with harm?”

“They turned off