Cyborg Nation

by Kaitlyn O’Connor

  “Certainly!” Gideon responded. “After you!”

  Bronte flattened her ear more tightly against the door, straining to hear in the silence that followed that exchange. There was a scraping sound and then the sound of flesh smacking into flesh followed by a loud crash … as of someone falling down a ladder, because she heard dull clangs preceding the loud crash like a foot striking several rungs.

  “That was … a dishonorable blow, Gideon!” Jerico ground out. “You might at least have allowed him to get down the ladder before you kicked him in the face!”

  “This is not a contest of skills for points,” Gideon retorted. “It is war, and there is no honor in war, only winners and losers.” Another thud followed that retort and Bronte assumed it was the sound of Gideon dropping to the floor below.

  Realizing she had heard all she was likely to hear, Bronte retreated to the bed and settled on it, trying to decide what to make of the discussion. It was hard to make heads or tales of it, though. In the first place, she was hungry. The battle had interrupted the meal and now the entire galley was a wreck and there was no telling when any of them would get anything to eat. In the second, despite Gideon’s certainty that she wouldn’t hear them in the hold, she could hear a good deal of noise emanating from the bowels of the ship. And, in the third—well it just didn’t make any sense at all.

  The way they had been discussing contracts, she had thought at first that they were talking about a co-habitation agreement—as bizarre as that seemed even at the time. But they had talked as if they were all wanting to contract and that could not be done at the same time.

  They must have meant something else, she decided. She didn’t know why she’d leapt to the conclusion that it was a co-habitation agreement, except that it was clear they wanted sexual rights, but she had to have been wrong.

  Jerico opened the door and stared at her for a long moment. “Are you hungry?”

  Bronte eyed him doubtfully but finally nodded.

  “Good! I have cleared the dining area and prepared food for two.”

  Bronte didn’t bother to ask him why he’d only prepared food for two. She got up and followed him back into the galley, settling on the bench he’d wiped down and glancing around at the wreckage as Jerico set two plates on the table and settled across from her.

  “Gideon and Gabriel are rearranging the supplies in the hold,” he said coolly when they heard a sudden, loud crash that made Bronte jump, followed by a good bit of roaring and cussing. “I believe the load shifted on take off. We were a little rushed when we were on loading.”

  “My things from my office?” Bronte gasped in dismay.

  He looked uncomfortable. “Those are in the forward hold,” he said smoothly.

  Bronte narrowed her eyes at him, certain he was lying. She had no desire to go below and defend her property from Gideon and Gabriel, however. Trying not to think about the crashes beneath their feet, or her things, Bronte focused on eating. It grew almost ominously quiet in the hold after a little while. Bronte found herself listening intently, more uneasy about the silence than she had been about the fighting. After a few minutes, however, she heard the definite sound of feet moving up rungs and a moment later, a hatch near the bridge popped open. Gideon emerged, raked a hand through his wild hair, and, after eyeing Bronte a moment, almost seemed to shrug. “Gabriel is ‘resting’ in the hold,” he said significantly. “When you are done, Jerico, mayhap you should just check to see if he … uh … needs a hand down there.” Moving somewhat stiffly, with one arm pressed tightly against his ribs, he limped past them, heading for the facilities.

  Jerico got up when Gideon had disappeared into the rearward cabin. Moving to the hatch Gideon had left open, he stared down the hole intently for several moments and finally returned to his seat.

  Bronte deduced from that, and also because Jerico seemed in no particular rush to finish his meal, that Gabriel at least appeared to still be breathing.

  Her nervous stomach wasn’t particularly conducive to digestion, but she finished her meal anyway. As she worked at chewing and swallowing food that had little taste or appeal, she found herself listening for any sound that might indicate Gabriel was up and about, fighting the urge to go and look for herself to see if he was alright. Jerico and Gideon had been at pains, though, to pretend there was nothing going on below and she was fairly certain Jerico would find a way to stop her if she tried.

  When she’d finished, she decided to help with clean up since it would give her an excuse to linger in the galley to see if Gabriel came up. Food had been strewn all over the galley, even slung up on the walls and ceiling, evidence that someone had already prepared, or been preparing, a meal before the battle.

  “That will not be necessary,” Gideon said coolly and Bronte glanced up to see he’d emerged from the cabin. He wasn’t bleeding anymore, but one eye was swollen nearly closed. His lower lip was split and thicker on one side than the other. There was a reddened knot on one cheek bone and another on his forehead, and there were fist and foot sized bruises all over his chest and belly. “We clean up our own mess.”

  Bronte lifted her brows questioningly.

  He shrugged. “It is a matter of maintaining discipline.” He colored faintly at her look of disbelief. “It is easy enough for a soldier who has never seen battle to sit on his hands when there is nothing useful to do, much harder for soldiers like us who have spent far less time outside of a battle than in one,” he added tightly. “If they have no other outlet, they will fight among themselves.”

  Bronte had the distinct feeling that that comment was a jab at her—as if it was her duty to put out so that they wouldn’t feel the need to beat each other’s brains out!

  She was almost more angry with herself for feeling guilty about it than she was with Gideon. Without another word, she dumped the trash she’d gathered, wiped her hands, and headed into the cabin to read.

  She’d read the same page nearly a dozen times when the door opened. Gabriel stood on the threshold for several moments, weaving drunkenly and finally headed toward the bed where she was sitting. With a pained grunt, he dropped to sit on the edge, hesitated as if he was gathering himself, and finally turned around and lay down, letting out a long breath as he lifted one arm and draped it over his eyes.

  She couldn’t help 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 so--praise and acceptance.

  Jerico had told her they didn’t hate humans, but they had given her that distinct impression before, made her feel guilty for things she had had no hand in, no control over.

  Was it just her imagination? Or had they set out to use guilt to make her empathize with their cause? And, if that was the case, why had they abandoned that psychological warfare so abruptly--within the first week of her captivity? It seemed likely that it had been intentional, not just accidental in the sense that they were so angry about it that they couldn’t control or contain their feelings of misuse.

  It was a very effective method of brain washing, but only if the message was pounded in repeatedly over an extended period of time. That would’ve seemed to have supported the suggestion that it had been unintentional except for the fact that it also suggested a radical change in their perception when they went from not being able to help spewing venom about their mistreatment to suddenly having no problem submerging their feelings.

  If it had been intentional the motive behind it, she felt sure, would have been to ensure that she was on their side by the time they reached their destination, to make certain that they could trust her to take the place they’d set aside for her without having to worry that she would use the opportunity to strike back at them.

  She would’ve liked to think that they’d abandoned the plan because, once they had begun to get to know her, they had realized that she would never, under any circumstances, harm the innocent, however she might feel about the people who’d orchestrated and implemented her captivity.

  Was that it, she wondered? Had brain washing been a part of the plan, but they’d seen that it wasn’t necessary?

  They had definitely been using reverse psychology on her, assuring her that they were nothing more than machines and at the same time proving they were anything but. She’d had the sense, though, that that was more of a defensive mechanism, because they had expected her to hate them. It was actually fairly typical human behavior to forestall rejection one expected by rejecting the other person first. Pride, ego, or sheer contrariness made it easier to push others away before they could do the snubbing because then one couldn’t get hurt.

  Maybe that was it? Maybe there had never been a plan at all to try to brainwash her into shifting her loyalty from her fellow humans to the cyborgs? Maybe they’d just been so hounded by the company trying to wipe them out that they’d been sure all humans would hate them on sight and they’d been braced for it, already defensive before they’d even given her a chance?

  She frowned at that, realizing that she’d heard enough to know that even the cyborgs had a ‘class’ system—that Gideon, Jerico, and Gabriel had even more of a reason to feel persecuted and defensive than the others. The Hunters, apparently, ranked at the very top of the pyramid because they were not just top of the line cyborgs. They had everything the very best had and much more. They had been programmed to believe they were human, right down to the tiniest detail—a past, memories that made them capable of functioning as if they’d been born, not manufactured. She suspected that it had come as a severe blow to them to discover they weren’t and they were probable wrestling with some pretty serious psychological issues of their own, but obviously the cyborgs didn’t see it that way. To their thinking, although obviously they would rather die than admit it, they were inferior. They were intelligent enough to understand that they lacked something critical, knowledge and skills that would help them to fit into the new social structure their kind had established better, but were unable to fill in the gap.

  After reasoning it over for a little while, she decided that she’d probably guessed right about a lot of it. It seemed logical that whoever had sent them would consider it absolutely necessary to do whatever it took to shift her loyalties, especially since they expected her to be influential in the lives and development of their young. They not only wouldn’t want to take the chance they she would hurt them. They wouldn’t want to take the chance that she would try to manipulate her patients.

  She didn’t think it would have occurred to Gideon that she might be trying to manipulate them if they hadn’t set out to manipulate her.

  She still didn’t know why they’d abandoned the plan—although it was clear
they had—but she was as certain as she could be that it had been part of their original orders.

  She was equally certain that she wasn’t mistaken about their defensiveness and that it wasn’t just her bleeding heart that saw them as ‘wounded’. The humans who’d created them wanted to annihilate them … and they didn’t even feel the equal of their peers because they’d only been originally designed to perform a specific function. They could be soldiers, servants, or pleasure bots, but in every case they were expected to be slaves to humanity, puppets that could be used or discarded, where the others had been able to walk among humans and interact as their equals, completely undetected.

  She actually felt more uneasy once she’d reasoned it out, though. It would almost have been easier to accept that she was ‘blameless’, under mind control—theirs--instead of her own. If she accepted that they hadn’t deliberately manipulated her, though, she also had to accept that her soft heart was once again working contrary to what should have been a much stronger instinct of self-preservation. She was flawed.

  Of course there was no doubt that their motives for kidnapping her hadn’t been nefarious. They needed her and knew damned well no human was going to just volunteer to help them. That left them in the position of either doing without or taking what they needed.

  That didn’t make it alright. On the other hand, she was obliged to admit that, if she’d been in the same position they were, worried about the health of her child, and she’d had no choice but to let the child suffer or take whatever steps necessary to see that it didn’t, she would’ve at least been tempted to do the same thing.

  She still felt that she should’ve hated them for it. She still thought she shouldn’t have been able to empathize with them, let alone feel, more and more, a compulsion to heal their ‘wounds’.

  She knew part of that growing need to give was linked to the physical attraction she felt toward them. If she had found them unappealing she would’ve been less inclined to be receptive to anything else.