Cyborg Nation

by Kaitlyn O’Connor

  Gideon must be in agony from having carried her, she thought dully. He hadn’t asked either of the others to carry her, though. She wondered if it was just a high tolerance for pain, an ability to simply block it out, or if he’d just endured because he thought it might hurt her more to shift her to someone else.

  Or maybe, in spite of what he’d said, Jerico and Gabriel were both hurt too much to carry her?

  She twisted her head at that thought, trying to peer at Gabriel in the gloom. She couldn’t see any more than a faint gleam along his skin as it caught the little light that filtered inside the cavern, but she thought he was looking at her. “How is your wound?”

  “It has closed.” His hand brushed her face. “You are warmer?”

  She was shivering. “Y-yes,” she lied through chattering teeth.

  He let out a sound of impatience. “Gideon and Jerico will be back soon. It will be safe enough to build a fire in here. The light can not be seen except from the sea—and the wind will carry the smoke away.”

  “And the waves will wash away your footsteps along the beach,” Bronte added.

  He stroked his hand along her cheek again and then shifted, very carefully covering her upper body with his and supporting himself on his elbows. “Better?”

  Bronte sighed as his warmth filtered through her. His body blocking the bursts of air through the cave mouth would almost have been enough even without his warmth but that was very welcome. She wanted to crawl under him. “Yes, much. It can’t be very comfortable for you, though.”

  She felt his lips curl against her cheek as he dipped his head to rest it lightly against her face. “I am comfortable … except....”

  “Except?” she prompted.

  “This does not feel at all the same as the times when Gideon and Jerico and I have had to share body heat.”

  The comment surprised a snicker out of Bronte. “I should hope not!”

  She felt him smile against her skin again.

  “You think that I am trying to be humorous?”

  “Succeeding.”

  “Mayhap, but I did not mean it as you think.”

  She turned her face to nuzzle it in the crook of his neck, enjoying the contact as well as his scent. “How did you mean it?”

  He was silent for so long she’d begun to think he wouldn’t answer. “I am not at all certain,” he said finally. “It is different, that is all I know.”

  “How does it make you feel?” she asked quietly.

  “Good,” he said promptly. “Not as good as when we are fucking, but very good.”

  It hurt to laugh, Bronte discovered.

  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 b
een 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 out to destroy the cyborgs to finish the cleanup.

  Jerico distracted her from her thoughts when he approached her and settled beside her with a steaming cup. It smelled like chicken broth. It was probably something they’d ‘invented’ from the dehydrated foods they’d brought along, but it smelled wonderful. Even though she hadn’t thought she was hungry, Bronte’s stomach immediately began to beg for food.

  Setting the cup down, Jerico lifted her shoulders and settled her on his extended leg for support. Bronte looked at him questioningly.

  “You will be able to drink this better in this way, I think,” he responded to the question in her expression.

  Not a lot better, she thought wryly, but she certainly couldn’t drink lying flat of her back and she was afraid to try to sit up on her own when every previous attempt to use her stomach muscles to sit up had resulted in agony. On the other hand, he hadn’t eaten anything. She pointed that out.

  “I will eat when you have drunk this.”

  She nearly dropped the cup when she tried to pick it up. She didn’t know how he’d managed to bring it to her without burning himself, but she knew if the contents was as hot as the container it would burn all the way to her stomach if it didn’t burn a hole in the bottom. “It’s too hot. Why don’t you go eat and come back and help me when it’s cooled?”

  He ignored the suggestion, blowing on it to cool it instead.

  She watched him surreptitiously, her mind still on what she’d just discovered, wrestling with the temptation to ask more.

  “There is something distressing you?” he asked finally.

  She frowned. “I knew that you were soldiers and that all of you had been involved in a good bit of fighting. I just hadn’t considered what battles you might have been involved in.”

  She saw he was frowning faintly, but she couldn’t tell what thoughts might be running through his mind.

  “We have much fighting experience,” he said finally, offering the cooled soup to her. “Three years fighting for the Confederation in the Ho-Shu galaxy war on the moons of Galpo in the Neavia system—Ralo and Ben-Tavo. Two years on Xeno-12. For one year after we had left the forces of the Confederation, we remained on Xeno-12 with the resistance army. We fought as mercenaries in the army of Juda-Fal in the Maccan system for another four years, SEY (standard earth years) and then when the hunters began to stalk us, personal skirmishes with death squads on many worlds in the years after that, until we joined the Cyborg Forces—now two years ago.

  “You should not have been frightened that we could not protect you from the trogs. It is true that they attack in large numbers, but we are far stronger and far more skilled and experienced fighters, fully cognizant of effective battle strategy and cool headed enough in battle to carry out the execution of proven tactics, whereas they are disorganized and too crazed with blood lust in the heat of battle to use their heads.

  “Not that they are equal in intelligence with us anyway, but they can not even use the intelligence they have when they allow themselves to be blinded by such chaotic emotions as rage and excitement.”

  Bronte was so unsettled by his calm recital of the horrors they had lived through that it was several moments before she realized that he’d completely misinterpreted the reason for her curiosity and the reason she’d struggled so hard to get away from the fighting earlier.

  It explained so much that she hadn’t really understood before—especially their propensity for violence. No wonder they were so prone to settle disagreements with their fists! They had never known anything else. The wonder of it was that they were sane at all! Or capable of any kind of gentleness—and they were. Even at their roughest, they’d never hurt her when they could easily have done so inadvertently if they hadn’t been very careful with her.

  It also explained why Gabriel and Jerico, as capable as they seemed of making their own decisions, inevitably bowed to Gideon. Gideon had led them through innumerable battles, earning not just implicit trust, but forming a bond between the three that had been forged in blood and could not be broken.

  Except by her, she realized. Gideon had wanted her badly enough he had been willing to break that bond if she was bent on breaking it. She didn’t know that Gabriel and Jerico had been equally willing, but the fighting among them certainly seemed to suggest that. And she was suddenly very glad that she hadn’t been put in the position of coming between them. Nothing good could come of breaking that kind of bond.

  “I wasn’t afraid that you couldn’t protect me,” she told him finally. “I suppose I should have been, and probably would have been except that I was in no condition to focus on much besides the pain.

  “It’s hard to be afraid of dying when you’re in that much pain,” she added wryly. “All I could think about was that if one of you tripped over me and fell you could be overwhelmed and killed before you could get up to protect yourself. I was just trying to stay out of the way.”

  He frowned thoughtfully and finally nodded. “There was the possibility. I had not considered that, but the fighting was close. You still should not have concerned yourself and tried to move. That part was not wise when your risked damage to yourself. If one of us had fallen, the others would have been warned and would have adjusted their stance accordingly.”

  She stared at him sadly, feeling her chest tighten. “Jerico—I didn’t do it because it was a ‘wise’ decision. I didn’t want any of you to be hurt.”

  He nodded. “Yes. I understand, but even if only two had been left, you would have been safe. We had slain many by then.”

  Bronte bit her lip, but shook her head. “No, Jerico,” she said gently. “You don’t understand. I know it’s hard for you to understand, but I care about you and Gideon and Gabriel.”

  He looked surprised and then pleased. “Because we are bonded by contract? I found it in the wreckage. Gideon said that we must if possible else we would not have the file for official recording and the council might decide to dispute it.”

  She frowned. “I wouldn’t have contracted to begin with if I hadn’t already felt bound to you three by affection,” she tried again.

  He looked stunned, almost spilled the last of the soup down her neck. “You feel affection?”

  Bronte thrust the cup away. “Yes.”

  He thought that over. “It was something we did?”

  She couldn’t help but chuckle. “A lot things.”

  “How does this feel?” he asked curiously.

  Bronte felt her smile slip. She sighed. “Maybe you’ll feel it one day, too, and then you’ll know.”

  He nodded, looked for several moments as if he would question her further and then instead helped her to settle on the ground again and went to eat. Bronte stared at nothing, focused on trying to quash the hurt. It didn’t matter how many times she told herself that she was searching for something that wasn’t in their make-up, she still expected to find it. She still believed, or maybe just hoped, that it was there, that it just needed to be coaxed forth and nurtured.

  She had to accept, though, that it wasn’t and probably never would be, that they just weren’t capable of feeling any sort of fondness at all. Could that void really matter, though, if she came to love them? Wouldn’t it be enough to have a life with them and know they were devoted to that life? To share passion? The passion alone was more than she’d ever expected to find in a relationship. They would be faithful, she thought, and industrious. Every relationship was flawed in some way and people still managed to make them work—at least for a while.

  There was always the incompatibility clause if she d
iscovered she was too miserable to live with it, she reflected morosely.

  It was going to be a struggle to try to adjust in a lot of ways, she realized. She couldn’t help but find a lot of their confusion funny, but Gabriel had made it clear that, even while he didn’t fully grasp what there was about it that she found amusing, he knew why she thought it was funny. She didn’t want to hurt them by constantly pointing out failings they were already aware of and sensitive about.

  It was going to be hard dealing with their idea of resolving disputes for that matter, but she’d already grown far more accustomed to it than she would’ve thought she could. And Gabriel had promised that they would rotate their shifts, which should make things more peaceful even if she did feel guilty about them sacrificing their companionship to be her companion.

  And then there was the problem of getting used to living with three different men when she wasn’t used to living with even one. Even if they were in and out, she would still have to deal with that.

  Typically, she’d jumped before she’d really thought everything through, she realized in dismay. She’d been so caught up in the passion they shared, though, and so bowled over by their ruthless determination to have her, and so focused on her own need to be needed, she had barely even considered the practical side of such a relationship. Beyond acknowledging that she was in a position where she would have to chose mates among them and the wisdom of having protection, she hadn’t even considered the mundane but absolutely essential economics of the arrangement—which Gabriel had thoughtfully pointed out.

  Under the circumstances, it was impossible to ignore the fact that her decision had been almost purely emotional. She’d known that, physically, she found them tremendously appealing, and also on an intellectual level. She’d also known she was drawn to them because they seemed to need her in a way they weren’t even conscious of.