Cyberevolution Book III: Cyborg Nation

CYBORG NATION

By

Kaitlyn O'Connor





(c) copyright March 2007 Kaitlyn O'Connor

Cover art by Jenny Dixon (c) copyright March 2007

New Concepts Publishing

4729 Humphreys Rd.

Lake Park, GA 31636

www.newconceptspublishing.com





This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.





Chapter One


Bronte Nichols’ thoughts were focused inwardly, as they so often were, as the lift settled and the doors opened. There a was man standing in the cubicle, which was so unexpected it actually pierced Bronte’s abstraction. She stared at him blankly, partly because she was surprised to see anyone at all so early in the morning and partly because, for some unfathomable reason, she discovered he was not completely in focus.

Prompted by the instinctive urge to keep from being left behind, she leapt inside just as the doors began to close again. Uneasiness washed over her even as she yielded to the impulse, effectively trapping herself inside with the stranger. It wasn’t just that he was big—really big—a stranger, or even the fact that she so rarely met up with anyone at all when she arrived at work so early.

His stance seemed relaxed, unthreatening, and yet Bronte sensed that he had tensed when he’d seen her just as she had when she’d spotted him and there was something about that that set off alarm bells in her head.

After staring at him owl eyed for a moment, she finally remembered her manners, nodded politely in greeting, and turned to stare at the doors instead, or rather the level indicator. She didn’t exactly see the screen displaying the levels the lift was passing. In her mind’s eye, she was shifting through the vague impressions her eyes had recorded of the stranger.

She was certain he was a stranger to her. In the first place, she never spoke to anyone aside from her staff members and the parents of her patients … and of course her patients. In the second, as distracted as she generally was with her own thoughts, she still thought she would have noticed a man as large as the one behind her if she’d run across him in the medical center before. He wasn’t just tall, he was big, muscular if the form fitting, one piece suit he was wearing was any indication, and she thought it probably was. It looked like the uniform of the med center’s security guards, but there was something about him that, somehow, just didn’t seem to go with the uniform.

Not that she’d actually been able to make out much more than that about him—big, very tall, and dark hair. His features had seemed pleasingly regular—but blurred so she wasn’t so certain she could trust that impression. She was certain he had dark hair though it seemed it had been slicked tightly against his skull in a very odd sort of hair style—not the way the security guards generally wore their hair at all. In fact mostly they just shaved their heads so that there was little more than stubble sprouting from their scalps and sometimes not even that.

Which brought her mind back to the subject that had engrossed her before the doors of the lift had opened. “My glasses,” she muttered under her breath. “Now what did I do with them? I’m sure I had them when I left the apartment. I distinctly recall that I had them.”

“On your head.”

The deep, resonant voice behind her startled her. Not only had she not realized she’d been muttering aloud, but she’d become so engrossed with her conversation with herself she’d momentarily forgotten she was sharing the elevator. Her lips parting with surprise, she whipped her head around at the sound of his voice, lifting a hand absently to her head as she did so. Her fingers connected with something in her hair, dislodging whatever it was.

As it fell, she and the stranger both bent instinctively to catch it… and butted heads. The blow made Bronte’s knees buckle and she sat on the floor of the lift, one hand flying upward to massage the throbbing knot where their heads had connected. “Oh! I do beg your pardon! Are you alright?”

His face came into focus as he leaned down, wrapped the fingers of one hand around her left upper arm, hauled her to her feet, and then shoved the glasses he’d managed to rescue onto her nose. Briefly, his face came into sharp focus before blurring again when he moved too close for her eyes to focus with the aid of the glasses. Bronte felt her face reddening as she gaped up at him and it sank slowly into her mind that he was quite the most handsome man she’d ever run in to, either literally or figuratively.

Not that she made a habit of running into strange men! She had had a few accidents, however, and she grew an even brighter red until her skin was no doubt rivaling her dark auburn hair as she recalled her last embarrassing encounter with a man.

She’d rather liked Dr. Pool, too, or at least thought she might be interested in the man on a purely feminine level, but he’d been far more embarrassed by the collision than she was. He had made it a point to give her a wide berth after she’d mowed him down at the corner of the connecting corridors where they had their respective offices and she was fairly certain she’d blown yet another, rare, opportunity to find a soul mate … or at least a fuck buddy.

She became aware suddenly that the man, the stranger, was still gripping her arm, his gaze wandering over her speculatively. “Do I know you?” she asked politely, certain that she couldn’t possibly have met him before. But then, he was being very familiar, really, for someone who didn’t know her.

“Dr. Nichols?”

Bronte blinked. Apparently he did know her. “Yes?”

His frown deepened instead of clearing. “B. A. Nichols?”

Understanding dawned. Bronte chuckled, but she felt her blush rising again. “My father was Bryan Alexander Nichols. I’m Dr. Bronte Alexandra Nichols.” She hesitated uncomfortably. The plan had been that she would join her father in his practice once she’d completed her residency. She had so been looking forward to it, too, getting to work beside a man of his reputation, getting the chance to actually get to know her father at last. She certainly hadn’t had the opportunity when she was growing up. After her mother had died when she’d been little more than an infant, her father had settled her with his sister and her brood, and she’d only gotten a handful of visits from her godlike father over the years. “Uh … my father’s dead,” she added baldly. “But I’ve taken over his practice. Were you looking for a pediatrician?”

Her stomach seemed to drop at the realization that that must, indeed, be why he was in the medical center, though it seemed an odd time to be doing so. Her first appointment wasn’t for hours yet. Tamping her disappointment at the discovery that he was a potential patient, or at least must have one--a child--and therefore must be married, or at least involved with someone, Bronte glanced down at the hand that still gripped her arm and then noticed she’d attached her badge upside down when she’d put it on that morning. No wonder he’d had trouble reading it!

She tugged at her arm as she reached to adjust the name badge. Almost reluctantly, it seemed to her, he released his hold on her then reached past her and tapped the panel used to select levels. The lift braked, stopped, and began to descend as rapidly as it had been rising. The action reminded Bronte belatedly that she’d forgotten to key in the level she wanted. She discovered when she turned to look at the panel, though, that the lift had already shot past her level.

Her lips flattened in irritation as she reached to press her level. She hadn’t just come early because she never slept well and was too restless to remain in her apartment any longer. She’d intended to catch up on some of her paperwork—which was why she’d been so distracted to begin with. Dread always filled her when she had to tackle the mounds of paperwork she allowed to build up while she attended the part of her job she actually enjoyed … interacting with her patients. And then, too, she’d been worried that she’d misplaced her glasses … again.

She really ought to have her eyes fixed, ought to have done it already, but there never seemed to be time. And actually, the prospect unnerved her, though she wouldn’t have admitted it under torture. She was a physician herself, for god’s sake! It didn’t look good that she was such a coward about facing medical procedures herself!

The lift settled and the doors opened.

A man, dressed much as the one behind her, stepped into the lift.

Bronte tried not to stare, but he was much like the man behind her—very tall, built like a tank, and dressed in the skin tight uniform that left very little to the imagination and made it impossible for her not to notice as her gaze flickered over the broad chest and shoulders, bulging arms and well developed legs … and the almost obscene bulge at the apex of his thighs. She shuffled over to give him room and then looked up as the sense of being loomed over swamped her, discovering that both men were looming over her because she was sandwiched between them and they were looking down at her.

“This is Dr. Nichols,” the first man said to the second, drawing Bronte’s gaze for a moment before she glanced at the man he was speaking to.

After trying to adjust her glasses and discovering that both men were too close to bring into focus, Bronte shoved her glasses onto the top of her head. She was a bit stunned to discover when she had that the second man was as unusually attractive as the first, though they looked nothing alike beyond the fact that both were dark. The new arrival, though, was not quite as dark. Whereas the first man’s hair was as black as night, his eyebrows a thick, straight line above eyes a steel, almost eerie blue, the second man had hair of a slightly warmer shade, though still very nearly black. She might have thought it black if not compared to the first man’s hair. His brows were also dark and thick, but arched. At the moment, one was lifted upward while the other had descended in a look she could only think was displeasure, even if not for the cool assessment in his emerald green eyes.

“B. A. Nichols?” the second man asked, obviously no more pleased than the first man had been.

Bronte tried not to feel slighted, but she couldn’t prevent the resentment that swelled in her chest. It was completely unfair to compare her unfavorably to her father. He had had many years to build his reputation, after all! Given time, she fully intended to live up to his name … but there was the rub. It was a hard act to follow, and she’d been viewed under a microscope and compared unfavorably almost from the time she’d arrived in medical school. “I am imminently qualified, I assure you!” she responded somewhat defensively. “Although I have not had the years to build my reputation as my father did, I graduated at the top of my class and I have been practicing for several years now.” She couldn’t help but notice they looked unconvinced. “And, of course, I have the added advantage of having worked with a man of vast experience in the field.”

She felt a little uncomfortable about that claim, but it wasn’t exactly a lie … just a slight prevarication. She had worked along side experienced physicians while she was doing her residency and she had her father’s case studies, after all.

The two men exchanged a long, speaking look above her head and seemed to come to a decision. After a moment, they shifted slightly away from her, still crowding her personal space uncomfortably, but not quite as uncomfortably as before.

She dragged in a shaky breath, not realizing until that moment just how unnerved she’d been.

Not that she wasn’t still more than a little unnerved.

She felt overly warm, too.

Actually, now that she thought about it, she felt almost … dizzy, definitely jittery. Distracted by that realization, she fell to analyzing her reaction. It dawned on her after a very few moments that her chaotic response was on a purely feminine level and had very little, if anything, to do with any primal sense of threat. Pheromones, she realized dimly as she inhaled and felt her body react to the chemical even though she wasn’t actually aware of the scent. The combined testosterone of the two overpoweringly male strangers was enough to bring any self-respecting, red blooded female instantly into heat.

Rather pleased by the discovery that, despite her preoccupation with the sciences, she could indeed react like any other woman, Bronte flicked a tentative smile at the newcomer, who glanced down at her as the lift, at last, stopped at her level and the doors began to open. She’d already tensed to step off when the opening doors revealed yet another man, dressed as the first two.

This one, however, was fair … and carrying a rather large piece of equipment that was heavy enough it made every considerable muscle in his upper body and arms bulge with effort. Bronte was so mesmerized by the powerful display that she wasn’t aware that the man had crowded her into the back corner as he stepped into the lift with his load until she stepped on the feet of the man behind her and fell against him. An arm came around her waist, molding her to every deliciously hard, sculpted inch of his body. Embarrassed at her clumsiness but grateful that he hadn’t allowed her to fall when she’d lost her balance and fell against him, Bronte tipped her head back to smile at him apologetically. “I am so sorry! Excuse me!”

He met her gaze, his arm tightening around her. A shiver chased down her spine, but she wasn’t certain if it was because the icy color of his eyes made him appear so cool and detached, or if there really was no warmth in his gaze. Something long and hard rose against her buttocks, however, that completely disordered her mind. “No problem,” he responded after a long moment of hesitation, his voice as cool and as lacking in inflection as his gaze.

He didn’t let go of her at once. In fact, he didn’t let go of her at all. Bronte looked down at the arm clamped around her waist and then toward the doors of the lift just as they closed. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “This was my floor!”

The blond man, she discovered, was looking her over with the same detached interest the other two men had. Groping for the glasses she’d shoved on top of her head, she winced as strands of her hair, tangled in the piece, parted company with her scalp as she dragged the glasses down to help her see him more clearly. The face that came into view sent a jolt through her.

It was hard and angular, purely masculine and yet so classically formed and appealing ‘beautiful’ was the first thought that popped in her mind. Framed by long, beautiful blond hair that hung loosely well past his shoulders, ending just past the hard male breasts that still bulged from the thing he held, she was dimly aware that hair that luxuriant should have looked completely out of place on a man who looked so very, very … male, and yet it didn’t. The glossy, wavy hair only seemed to emphasize his masculinity, to set off his god-like perfection to greatest advantage.

What were the odds, she thought distractedly, of finding herself in a lift with three such exceptional specimens? Astronomical, she decided, even though she couldn’t seem to focus her mind on running the calculations, because she hadn’t seen a single man in all her years that came close to even one of them.

“This is Dr. Nichols,” said the man behind her at just about the time Bronte managed to free her gaze from the sapphire-eyed blond god before her and glanced down at what he held.

She frowned as she stared at the filing unit he held and a flicker of recognition dawned. Instantly diverted, she looked the piece over more carefully. It didn’t just look familiar. It was familiar! It was hers!

Doubt instantly swept over her, though, as it occurred to her to wonder why in the world anyone would take her files from her office—the whole filing unit! She frowned, wondering if she’d forgotten to pay her office rent and was being evicted … or if they’d simply decided to move her. Indignation filled her at that thought.

“This is B. A. Nichols?” the blond man questioned, tilting his head to study her curiously. “The data banks listed a male.”

“Obviously not current,” the black haired man holding her commented. He almost seemed to shrug. “They are … inefficient.”

Bronte craned her neck to look up at the man. “They?” she echoed, feeling the sting as a personal insult even though she had nothing to do with updating the data bank herself.

He caught her face in the crook between his thumb and forefinger before she could look away, studying her face with that same unnerving intensity of before. “She is obviously qualified, however, in her field else she would not be practicing medicine.”

Bronte stared up at him, fighting the mesmerizing effect he had upon her, realizing dimly that although his words seemed no more than a dispassionate appraisal of her skills as a physician, the look in his eyes, to say nothing of the brick hard erection digging into her backside, seemed to indicate his thoughts were not entirely on her credentials.

“What’s going on here?” she managed to ask as it finally dawned on her that there were undercurrents besides those heated waves eddying through her at the nearness and rapt attention she held of all three men.

Instead of answering her question, the man released his hold on her. She stared up at him a moment longer and turned to look at the other two men. She hadn’t imagined she held center stage. The other two men were studying her with the same intensity. Without any indication of discomfort at all, they held her gaze for several moments and then the three men exchanged a look very like the one the first two had exchanged before when the second man had gotten on the lift.

“She is young. Should we look for someone with more experience?”

Bronte frowned indignantly at the man with the dark, brown hair, torn between a feminine desire to maintain her youth and a professional desire to defend her experience. “I am young,” she snapped. “I was not only at the top of my class. I was the youngest in my graduating class! And I took over my father’s practice nearly a year ago … besides my years in residence! I am fully qualified!”

None of them looked as impressed as she felt like they should have, but then again it struck her that, of the three, she’d never seen anyone any better at hiding their thoughts behind such expressionless masks. Aside from the faint frowns that flickered across their faces, that looked like a mixture of speculation and puzzlement, they gave nothing else away.

They seemed to come to some sort of tacit agreement, though, as the lift halted once more and the doors opened. Bronte’s gaze was drawn by the movement. Surprise filled her when she discovered they were on the roof. In the distance, the sky was just beginning to lighten with the promise that the sun would soon crest the horizon.

Closer to hand, though, blocking most of the view, sat a sleek black star cruiser, its hatch open and gangway extended like a tongue. She’d barely registered the ship, which had no business at all on the roof of the med center since it was clearly not an ambulance, when a blast of light erupted, slamming into the roof inches from the lift opening. The concussion of the blast stunned her, seemed to knock the breath from her lungs.

It didn’t have the same effect, or even nearly that effect, on the three men. The man still holding her yanked her off her feet and charged off the lift directly behind the other two. Contrary to what she might have expected if she’d had her wits about her, the blond did not toss his burden aside. Instead, he ran full tilt toward the gangway as if the thing weighed no more than a feather. The brunette dragged a laser pistol from the holster strapped to his leg and returned fire as the man holding her charged past, also firing with his free hand as he raced toward the cruiser with her under one arm as if she was no more than a feather. He wasn’t even winded when he’d raced up the gangway and deposited her none too gently into a seat.

Stunned, expecting any moment to feel her body disintegrate along with the ship around her, Bronte’s gaze followed instinctively as the man raced to the control console, working the controls so quickly his hands were little more than a blur of movement even before he dropped into the seat beside the blond. An explosion rocked the ship, effectively diverting Bronte. Gripping the arms of the chair she’d been dropped into, her head swiveled of its own accord toward the deafening sound and the metallic pinging of flying metal. She was just in time to see the brunette land flatfooted on the deck, slamming a hand against the control that lifted the gangway and sealed the hatch.

Without comprehension, she stared at the now ragged uniform he wore, taking in the gashes along his arm and leg and the blackened, gaping flesh where lasers had torn into him. There was little blood. Lasers tended to seal the flesh and veins even as they burned through them. What caught her attention and held it, though, was the gleaming metal, not bone, exposed by the wounds.

She was still staring at the metal, trying to wrap her mind around everything that had happened and the implications of seeing metal rather than charred bone, when the man stalked up to her, grasped the restraints she hadn’t had the wit to fasten and quickly fastened her in. He’d barely done so when the craft shot from the roof like a launched missile, plastering her to the back of her seat.

The man grabbed her seat back to keep from being pitched toward the rear of the ship. The metal groaned, as if it was about to be ripped loose from its mooring, but, thankfully, held as he launched himself across the aisle and managed to land in the seat apparently reserved for him.

That feat shocked her almost as much as everything that had gone before. She couldn’t begin to guess how many G’s the ship was pulling in its almost vertical climb, but she knew it would take superhuman strength to combat it.

Any man, no matter if he was built like a tank, as this one was, would have been plastered against the bulkhead at the rear of the cockpit.

The truth, despite the implications, was slow in coming simply because of the shock and her absolute unwillingness to accept what her senses told her.

No wonder, she thought, feeling faint and cold with sudden terror, these men were such marvels of perfection, so perfectly wonderful and beautiful if every way. They weren’t men at all! They were rogue cyborgs … and she’d just spent the last fifteen minutes convincing them that they should kidnap her instead of looking for a doctor that was more experienced!






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 at the single word, made significant both by the pause that went before and the deep, almost husky inflection of his voice. Dismayed by her body’s instinctive reaction, Bronte said no more as he moved past her at last and the other cyborg removed his harnesses, rose, and followed him.

When Bronte glanced toward the man at the controls of the ship, she saw that he was still studying her. He met her gaze for a long moment and finally turned away.

Released, Bronte drew a shuddering breath into her burning lungs, unconscious of the fact, until that moment, that she’d been holding her breath. She’d been dismissed, very coolly at that. She sat staring at the view beyond the ship for some time, trying to marshal her scattered wits. Why, she wondered, had they taken her when they appeared not only to have no use of her services, but no trust or liking for humans in general?

She frowned at that. Liking, or disliking, were emotions. He’d pointed out the obvious, that they were machines and had no ability to feel as their creators did. And yet she wasn’t entirely comfortable with that conclusion. Maybe it was just that they seemed so human-like that she expected them to behave like humans? Then again, they had been designed to blend with humanity, to interact with them, because humans weren’t comfortable being around great, hulking, powerful machines that utilized artificial intelligence.

Some of the older models, which had merely been humanoid in design, had been just plain scary. The manufactures had discovered they were never going to fill every household with two or three if they looked so ‘threatening’, which was why they’d really gone overboard changing the whole look of the robot, not only making them appear so human-like that they blended seamlessly with the population, but making them feel human, as well, so that they’d found a whole new market for them as sex toys.

As that thought congealed in her mind, Bronte wondered abruptly if these had been designed specifically as human sexual companions. She couldn’t prevent either the blush or the heat that rose inside of her as it dawned on her that she was already well aware that they were anatomically correct … which seemed to support that theory. And yet, if that was the case, why had they been built like … soldiers? Maybe they--the company--had merely figured one design would do, at least in the sense of making them multi-purpose so that the model worked equally well for either job?

That seemed likely. Why go to the expense of building a dozen different models for different jobs when they could build one to do any job the customer might want?

Could they all be the same model, though, when they looked as distinctly different as three different, unrelated humans would look?

Why did that matter, she thought abruptly?

It didn’t because it had no bearing on her situation that she could see.

They had a use for her. They must. There was no reason in the world for them to seek her out, and they obviously had, unless they did have some use for her. She could understand a drive in them to destroy the people they knew were hell bent on destroying them. They didn’t actually need anything more than a will to exist--and obviously they did have that—and a firm grasp on logic to realize that they must eliminate the threat to their existence in order to continue. But she was no threat to them. She was a doctor. She had never worked for the company in any way, shape, or form.

Besides, it would have been easy to kill her if that had been the objective. They’d caught her completely by surprise. One of them could have snapped her like a twig before she could have even gotten out a cry for help.

Without consciously coming to a decision, Bronte unfastened her safety harness and rose a little unsteadily. The blond cyborg turned to look at her, but he neither said anything nor made any attempt to stop her as she headed from the cockpit in search of the injured cyborgs. It wasn’t hard to find them. The ship was designed as a short range ‘hopper’, or at least in the vein of those crafts that had no need for a good deal of space. Beyond the main cabin/cockpit area, there was a small food preparation/eating area, a bathroom, or ‘head’, and beyond that only a single cabin. Bronte froze in the doorway once the hatch/door had opened.

Both men were stark naked and she’d never in her life seen that much naked male flesh. Prod her mind though she would to accept ‘cyborg’, her brain refused to give the lie to what her eyes saw. The one with black hair turned to stare at her. The other one glanced at her, but he was intent on cutting the charred flesh from the other man’s wound. Blood dripped from his hands, effectively distracting Bronte. Her belly clenched.

“What are you doing?” she gasped, surging forward.

“The laser cauterizes as it cuts,” the patient, or ‘victim’ said through clenched teeth. “The flesh can not mend together as is.”

Bronte didn’t realize she’d grabbed the hand of the cyborg cutting until his hand stilled beneath hers. “You can’t just … filet his entire chest and torso! He’ll lose too much blood … especially at the rate you’re going. To say nothing of the fact that it’ll leave a horrible scar! What did you use to deaden it? What do you have to close the wound with?

“You,” she said to the brunette, “move. You,” she added, grasping the other man’s hand, “sit down before you fall down and break something.”

Neither man moved and Bronte quickly discovered she couldn’t budge either one so much as a hair. Finally, the dark man nodded. He sank heavily onto the bunk when the brunette moved away, placing the scalpel he held in Bronte’s outstretched, demanding, hand. “I need antiseptic, something to deaden the area, something to close the wound, and sterile gauze,” she said absently.

The brunette got up. Her conscience smote her. He was wounded, too, but then she didn’t know where anything was and she needed to close the chest wound as quickly as possible to stop the bleeding. The brunette returned after a few moments, settling her bag of medical instruments—her bag—on the bunk beside them. Her files and now her bag, too? Had they taken everything from her office? She flicked a censorious glance at him, but she was relieved, too. She knew she would find everything she needed inside.

“You need only to cut the dead flesh and close the wound,” the man she was working on said, his voice harsh. She didn’t doubt pain had a lot to do with the roughness. She flicked a glance at him as she moved between his thighs and bent over to examine the upper area of the wound. “Maybe you actually like pain, but I don’t like inflicting it. I’ll feel better if I deaden the area, and I’ll certainly feel better making sure it isn’t likely to get infected,” she added as she disinfected her hands with the solution she unearthed from her bag.

To her surprise, his lips curled in the faintest of smiles. Amusement gleamed in his eyes. It disappeared so quickly, though, she wondered if she’d only imagined it. “I am a machine,” he growled.

“Meaning you feel no pain?”

He neither denied it nor admitted it.

“Liar,” she said softly and then felt a chilling rush at her unthinking remark, wondering if it would anger him. “What’s your name?” she added quickly to change the direction of his thoughts.

“Why would you think a machine would have a name … beyond its function … cyborg?”

Bronte sucked her lower lip into her mouth uneasily, but she felt a pang of empathy, too. She had gone into medicine as much because she felt a need to soothe the hurt and heal the sick as to impress the father she had admired so much, but there were times when she thought it was a mistake, that she was not cut out for this business of trying to heal. She felt the pain of others too deeply, and her instincts told her, whatever he had begun life as, he hurt, deeply, because his existence as a living, breathing, thinking being had been denied by his creators.

Her hand was shaking as she finished trimming and cleansing the wound along his breast. Lifting a hand, she brushed the beads of sweat from her brow and the hair that had clung to the dampness. After trying unsuccessfully to hold the wound closed and use the instrument to seal the flesh together, she reached down to catch his hands and had him press the wound closed. “I’m not your enemy,” she said quietly.

“You are human,” he pointed out.

She paused, staring at him in dismay. “So I can not be anything else?”

His gaze flickered over her as she stood between his thighs, leaning over him. His gaze lingered on her breasts for a long moment. The faint smile curled his lips again. “I am a superior model … designed to kill quickly and efficiently. But I was programmed to be a pleasure bot, as well. If you have a need …?”

Hot color flashed in Bronte’s cheeks. A chaotic flood of anger, fear, and--loath though she was to admit it—desire went through her.

She dragged her gaze from his. Her back had begun to burn from bending over to reach his wound. Pointedly ignoring the evidence that he had certainly not lied about being well equipped to function as a sex droid, she dropped to her knees and focused on the wound slashing across his torso. It was a shame to see such perfection marred by such a vicious wound. It was bound to make a terrible scar no matter how carefully she closed it.

“It will not make an unsightly scar. The nanos will mend it well enough.”

Bronte bit her lip, realizing she’d spoken her thoughts aloud. It was a very bad habit she’d developed—talking to herself.

“I am called Gabriel,” he murmured as she finished trimming the last of the scorched flesh away and used the gauze to carefully wipe as much of the blood from his belly as she could, trying not to notice the warmth of his skin beneath her fingers or the way he tensed infinitesimally at her touch. She glanced up at him in surprise. A faint frown drew her brows together as she pondered the familiarity of the name. Finally, she smiled. “From the ancient mythology of demons and angels. They were … heavenly beings of such beauty mankind was stuck with awe to look upon them. It suits you.”

He did something then that stunned her. He blushed.

He rose so abruptly when she’d finished sealing the wound he nearly bowled her over. She caught herself, watching as he strode across the room and touched a panel. A door slid open and she glimpsed the fixtures of a bathroom before the door closed behind him. Dragging her gaze back to the man who still needed attending, she rose to her feet, pressing her hand to the small of her back to relieve the strain. “If you could just lie down?”

He complied, stretching out full length on the bunk. Oddly enough, he looked bigger lying down than he had before, far more imposing, possibly because he seemed to take up the entire bunk? Suppressing the quiver that went through her without examining it too closely, she settled the bag of instruments beside the bunk and took his injured arm, struggling to lift it. He lifted it for her. Perching her buttocks on the edge of the mattress, she caught his arm and settled it across her lap. It was less of a strain on her shoulders and back to work seated, but she found she was almost more conscious of the man than she had been when she’d knelt in front of Gabriel.

Even thinking the name sent an unwelcome tingle of warmth through her. Added to her keen awareness of the man on the bunk, the warmth of his hip seeping through her clothing and into her buttocks, the warmth and weight of his arm across her lap, she discovered she had to force herself to concentrate on her task. When she’d cleaned the angry red flesh that surrounded his wound and coated it liberally with a topical anesthetic, she glanced at his face to discover he was studying her. “I suppose it would be too much to ask why you took me?” she asked hesitantly.

His dark brows drew together thoughtfully. “We were not ordered not to do so.”

Bronte waited. When he didn’t seem inclined to say more, she lifted her brows questioningly. “Well, why?”

“That should be obvious.”

Bronte’s lips flattened with a touch of irritation. “To you, maybe,” she responded tartly. “It isn’t at all obvious to me. You didn’t even want me to attend your wounds!”

“We did not ask.”

Bronte stared at him with more than a little irritation. He didn’t appear to be deliberately baiting her, but he was nonetheless. Getting answers out of him was like pulling teeth. It occurred to her after a moment, though, that what he’d left unsaid seemed to imply that they had wanted her to. They just hadn’t asked. “You wanted to, but you were afra … didn’t want to ask?”

His dark brows rose. “It did not occur to us to ask because it did not occur to us that you would be willing … and you are not trained as a surgeon, in any case.”

Bronte pursed her lips as she glanced down at his arm. “I am trained as a surgeon,” she disputed, “minor surgery, anyway. You were looking at my father’s records, if you recall, not mine. At least … you suggested as much.”

“I say … or do not.”

Confused, Bronte’s brows knitted as she focused on closing the wound. She looked up at him questioningly when she had finished. “I’m not sure what you mean by that.”

“I have not the facility for tact or subtlety or diplomacy. I was sold as a soldier and had no need for that. I do not suggest. I say, or do not.”

It still took Bronte several moments to understand because, she realized wryly, she was too distracted by his nearness to think straight. “So … you were not … uh … you didn’t....” She broke off abruptly, horrified that she’d felt the impulse to know if he had been programmed for sex as Gabriel had. She cleared her throat as she bent his arm and settled it across his chest. “You didn’t tell me your name,” she said to change the subject as she shifted down the bunk to examine the wound on his thigh.

“You did not ask.”

Bronte let out an irritated huff of breath, deciding she didn’t care what his damned name was. She didn’t think for a moment that he was so literal minded that he could not grasp the subtle meanings of any conversation. He was being deliberately provoking. She just didn’t know why.

It was a good deal more awkward, she discovered, to attend his thigh from a sitting position. She had to twist sideways to cleanse the area with the antiseptic. Before she could rise, however, he lifted the leg as he had his arm, dropping his thigh across her lap. Blood instantly flooded her cheeks as she found herself between his splayed thighs. Even as she opened her mouth to object, however, he hooked his leg around her, dragging her closer until there was no ignoring his anatomy whether she looked directly at it or not. His testicles were nestled snuggly against her hip.

His penis shifted with his repositioning of his body, landing against the thigh she needed to attend. She stared at the soft lump of flesh that settled against his leg when he shifted, completely unaware that she was staring, that she’d gone as perfectly still as if she’d been frozen in place.

“A little higher and I would have lost more flesh than I liked.”

The comment brought Bronte out of her trance, dragging her gaze upward to his face automatically. He stared back at her, his handsome face completely devoid of expression, and yet she had the sense that he was amusing himself at her expense, waiting for her reaction. Unconsciously moistening her dry lips, she dragged her gaze from his and looked down. With as much professional unconcern as she could manage, she moved his penis to lie across his testicles. The moment she let go of it, it flopped on his thigh again. This time, however, it was not soft … not fully erect either, but certainly noticeably firmer and fuller than before … and longer.

Resisting the urge to either touch it again or glance at his face, she decided to ignore it and focused on her task, desperate to finish as quickly as possible.

Gabriel emerged from the bathroom as she finished bathing the man’s flesh with the anesthetic. He was wet. Water dripped from his hair and trickled down across his bare chest. With a will of its own, her gaze encompassed his glistening body from the black hair slicked along his shoulders and upper chest to his bare feet. It took an effort to pry her gaze from him and even more of a struggle to tamp the shivery awareness that made her feel overly warm at the weight of his gaze on her.

She was a physician, she mentally berated herself! Nudity, no matter how fine the specimens, no matter how blatantly male, should not have the effect of completely addling her wits!

He crossed the cabin after a moment, pressing a panel on the wall opposite the bath that opened to reveal a locker. Relieved to see he was dressing, Bronte turned her attention to the wound and carefully clipped the burned flesh away from healthy flesh. As with Gabriel’s chest wound, she discovered she couldn’t hold the flesh together and manipulate her instrument at the same time. Apparently seeing her dilemma, Gabriel approached, knelt beside the bunk, and held the wound closed while she sealed it.

Releasing a sigh of relief when she’d finished, she glanced at Gabriel as she brushed her hair from her forehead with the back of one hand.

He was still bare-chested, she discovered with a start. He rose even as she glanced at him, turned on his heel, and departed, giving her a good view of his tight buttocks, which the thing he was wearing left completely exposed. She didn’t know what it was, but it was certainly not under-shorts!

Her patient caught her attention as he sat up. Still trapped by his leg, Bronte’s eyes widened as the movement brought his chest directly into her line of vision. She tipped her head back to look up at him just as his hands settled on either side of her head, entrapping her thoroughly for his perusal, which he took his time with.

“It is a very great shame that you are human,” he said finally.

“Why?” Bronte asked, her voice little more than a breathy whisper.

Something flickered in the depths of his deep, jewel green eyes. Instead of answering, he released his hold on her. Dropping his hands to her hips, he lifted her up and set her away from him and then rose and went into the facilities.

Bronte stared at the closed door for several moments after he’d disappeared and finally got up shakily. With the mindlessness of long practice, she gathered the things she’d used and returned them to her bag, more shaken than she could ever recall being in her life.

They’d taken her and she still had no clue why. She should have been shaking with terror, she mused, not thoroughly rattled by an inopportune surge of raging hormones and animal lust.

She was afraid, deep down scared, but that had certainly not prevented a physical response and her body clearly had no discrimination. They were cyborgs! Not even real flesh and blood men!

She glanced at her hands at that, staring at the blood that belied that thought.

They bled. They felt pain. Whatever they’d tried to make her believe, despite the fact that they’d managed to control it and move and behave as if they were completely unhurt, she knew better.

They hadn’t simply interacted with her, responded stiltedly in a facsimile of human behavior. They’d been toying with her, verbally sparring, provoking her to see how she would react.

They were not simply machines. She didn’t know what they were. She didn’t know how it had come about, but they had evolved well beyond machines with AI and clever programming. They were thinking beings! Sentient life forms!