Gabriel scrubbed a hand over his face and turned to pace his cell again, two paces across and three back. When he reached his cot, he threw himself down on it. “They took her to the med center. They will have treated her,” he said finally.
“Why did you argue with her that last day? What did you argue about?” Jerico demanded from his cell on the other side of Gabriel’s.
Gideon swallowed against a hard knot that felt like a fist in his throat. “I was angry and she became angry. I do not recall why.”
“You can not have forgotten unless your memory chip was damaged in the crash,” Jerico snarled angrily.
“It will do us no good if we are at each other’s throats,” Gideon growled. “We are already accused of a complete lack of discipline!”
“This is worse than being confined on the damned ship for months on end!” Jerico said irritably.
“Aye, else I would have knocked your teeth down your throat long before now,” Gideon snapped.
“You may have tried!”
“What I do not understand is why she has not tried to come to see us,” Gabriel put in. “She must still be angry with you.”
Gideon sat up abruptly, dropping his feet over the side of his cot and caught his head in his hands. “I accused of her of being in breach because she would not say what she thought was wrong and she said that I should break the contract.”
Neither Jerico nor Gabriel spoke for several moments.
“She did not mention that she would break with me and Jerico, though, did she?” Gabriel asked.
Gideon dropped his hands and slid a narrow eyed glare at Gabriel in the cell across from him. “Gabriel, I will strangle you with my bare hands....” He broke off abruptly. “It would not matter what she had said if that twice damned tablet had not broken! Now she is angry and we do not have the contracts!”
“I do not believe they tried to recapture the missing data!” Jerico put in, instantly diverted by his anger over that matter. “I would not put it past them to have tampered with the tablet and destroyed the documents before we could record them with the hall of records! They took one look at our beautiful Bronte and decided that she would suit them!”
“They will guard her.”
“But not for us. They will guard her from us!” Gideon growled.
A prolonged silence fell. “I miss cuddling with her,” Gabriel said morosely. “I had not thought I liked it that much but now I can not think of much else when I try to sleep. It is like something is gone that should be there.”
Gideon shot from his cot and began to pace again.
“Do not start that again, Gabriel!” Jerico snarled. “Or I will help Gideon throttle you when we get out of here!”
“They will not allow her to come,” Gideon said finally.
“Why would they not?” Gabriel demanded indignantly.
“Because we have claimed and we have no proof,” Gideon retorted tiredly, returning to his cot and settling on it again.
“If you are right, and it is not that Bronte does not want to see us, then mayhap we can convince her to sign with us again when we get out,” Gabriel said hopefully.
Gideon dropped an arm across his eyes. “Mayhap—if we have not already lost her before they allow us to leave.”
* * * *
It was all very well to tell herself that she must be calm, cool, and collected when she finally got her chance to speak for her men. It was another matter entirely to spend the better part of two weeks agonizing over the situation and the disaster she’d be facing if she failed and then still be calm.
She thought she might have handled it better if they hadn’t brought Gideon and Gabriel and Jerico into the chamber wearing prison uniforms and manacles. Seeing them at all was enough to throw her completely off kilter, but to see them like that, as if they’d already been convicted of what they’d been accused of, made her long to leap from her seat and rush from the room to cry her eyes out.
Because she could not cry in front of the investigating committee, she told herself angrily.
By the time she had regained her self-control enough to venture a peek at them, all three had been seated and were staring stonily at the men presiding over the hearing.
Caleb, seated beside her, divided a look between her and the men. She refused to meet his gaze when she felt him studying her, but she knew what was running through his mind. He thought she wouldn’t look at them because she was afraid of them, not because she was afraid she would ruin everything.
She was afraid the men sitting in judgment on them would think the same thing, but at least they would still doubt.
Maybe if she leapt to her feet and ran to embrace them, she thought a little wildly? Wouldn’t that prove she wasn’t afraid of them? And if she wasn’t, then nothing they’d thought could be true?
Or would they just think she’d lost her mind?
She calmed somewhat when they began by asking her questions about the crash. She’d thought through everything, over and over, carefully piecing her memories together until she was certain she could answer all of their questions without getting rattled. She had decided, after Caleb’s nasty remark, that she would be very careful to tell the absolute truth in every instance.
Unless things seemed to be going badly and then she would lie through her teeth and tell them whatever sounded good.
There were three men sitting on the committee—the three highest ranking of the entire colony according to Caleb—who’d been kind enough to point out that this was the one and only opportunity to settle the matter, one way or another. They looked hard, and cold, and completely uncompromising.
She had a bad feeling that being human wasn’t going to make points with them.
It was first time since she’d arrived that she’d felt completely alien. The fact that they were all cyborgs had never been far from 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 the proximity detector because they were preoccupied with non military matters, were they not?”
When they finally halted the barrage of questions, Bronte merely stared at them, trying to sort them in her mind and decide which to answer and how to answer them. Finally, she turned to look straight at Gideon and Gabriel and Jerico for the first time, meeting each of their gazes for several moments. She’d failed them. She knew she had. “I’m sorry,” she said when Gideon met her gaze.
“You do not answer to them! You have no need to fear them. It is clear they are guilty on all counts and they are unlikely ever to be released again.”
Bronte turned to look at Damon, and then Reuel and Kane, her fear and distress instantly transformed into rage. “You … assholes!” she yelled at them, coming to her feet. “I am not afraid of them! I love them and that is why I agreed to contract with them! And you should be ashamed even to question their loyalty or their integrity! You can lock me up, too! Or send me home, because there is no way in hell I’m ever going to trust any of you or willingly do a damned thing for any one of you!”
Reuel’s eyes narrowed on her. “You are overly emotional because you are human … and you are gestating. Otherwise, I might take exception.”
Wondering how her companions had taken that announcement of impending fatherhood, Bronte glanced at them quickly. Gabriel and Jerico were merely staring at her blankly and she wasn’t sure if they’d even caught that part. Mostly, she was fairly certain, they were just so stunned and appalled that she’d called their respected leaders assholes that they couldn’t think beyond that. Gideon was another matter. His gaze was riveted to her belly and there was no doubt in her mind that he was reeling. She just couldn’t tell if he welcomed the announcement or not.
“If you care for your companions as you claim,” Reuel went on, “how could you have so little concern for their off-spring?”
“That’s as unjust as any of the rest of this!” she said angrily. “How can I set the needs of my babies above the needs of my companions when it’s the same thing? They need their fathers! I need them! They did not disobey any of their orders. They didn’t do anything wrong!” She swallowed convulsively, studied them hopefully and then, in desperation, changed tactics. “Alright! You were right! It was me! I realized as soon as I’d had time to consider the situation that I’d be much better off with them to protect me than without them and I set out to seduce them into contracting with me.”
“All of them?”
She nodded vigorously.
“Even though it is not the custom on Earth to have multiple partners in co-habitation?”
“Right! I didn’t know that part then, so I was thinking about getting one to commit to the agreement but I figured any one would do, so I focused on all of them and figured if I could convince one maybe he could get rid of the other two and take me home.”
“Which was it?”
“What?” Bronte asked blankly.
“You were trying to get one or all to commit to a contract, or you were trying to convince one to take you home?”
“Whatever worked.”
“You would say anything to protect them, would you not?”
Bronte swallowed convulsively. “Which truth do you want, damn it! Because obviously the real truth just won’t fucking do for you!”
Reuel settled back in his seat. She couldn’t tell from the gleam in his eyes if he was amused or on the verge of blasting her with his temper. He jerked his head at Caleb. “Escort her out while we consider her testimony.”
She wanted to protest, but she realized she’d done enough damage. When Caleb caught her arm to lead her out, she merely threw an apologetic look at her companions. It was a big world, she reflected as he led her outside of the building. Maybe she could figure out a way to help them escape?
Assuming, of course, they weren’t ready to throttle her for totally botching her attempt to get them off already.
“That was not well done,” Caleb growled when they had reached the sidewalk.
“You think?” Bronte snapped angrily.
“Did you set out to insure that they would be found guilty?”
She narrowed her eyes at him instead of bursting into tears, which was what she felt like doing. “Yes! That’s ex
actly what I set out to do. I wasn’t satisfied with the fact that they’d already decided to crucify them for nothing!”
He studied her in silence for a moment. “It is true that you love them?”
Her chin wobbled threateningly. “I know it probably doesn’t seem like it when I screwed everything up, but I do. You have no idea how good they were to me or to what lengths they went to to protect me out there!”
He frowned. “But that was after you had contracted with them, according to what you said.”
She bit her lip. She hadn’t considered that. “I was already in love with them,” she said with a touch of surprise. Tears filled her eyes. “It was the craziest courtship, I’m sure, that was ever devised! I don’t know what I’m going to do....” She broke off as she averted her gaze from his and saw them emerging from the building. For a moment her heart seemed to stop. When the three of them stopped on the steps, scanned the people gathered on the street and sidewalk and finally settled on her, however, she whirled away from Caleb and dashed toward them.
Doubts plagued her—that they’d be angry with her—but she ignored the warning bells clamoring in her head. Gabriel met her first, rushing toward her with his arms out to catch her in his embrace. She hugged him back tightly. “They let you go?” she exclaimed when she drew away.
“Yes!” Jerico said chuckling as he dragged her from Gabriel’s arms and embraced her, covering her mouth in a kiss that made her feel hot, wet, and tingly all over. She smiled up at him dizzily when he released her and finally turned to Gideon.
His expression was taut, and uncertainty quivered through her. “Are you still angry with me?” she asked hesitantly.
He shook his head, pulling her close abruptly and holding her so tightly against him she could hardly catch her breath. “I was never angry, Bronte,” he murmured against her hair, “only afraid that I would lose you.”
She drew away from him finally and looked up at them. “I missed you so much!”
Gideon studied her solemnly. “It is true that you are carrying our baby?”
She smiled at him wryly. “I’d planned to make the announcement a little more intimate than that,” she said irritably. “But, yes! I am—I’m carrying all of your babies! I’m so proud I feel like I did it all by myself!”
Cyborg Nation Page 31
