Cyborg Nation

by [Cyborg 3] Cyborg Nation (lit)

  Light woke her again. She lay trying to block it for a while, but her mind threw off the mists of sleep and began sifting through flashes of memory. This time she didn’t feel pain until she tried to stretch. The movement didn’t just create pain inside of her, though, it surfaced the memory of laying between Gideon and Gabriel.

  She saw what was left of the ship when she finally opened her eyes but it took her many minutes to figure out that that was what she was looking at. Most of both sides were missing. A large section of what had been the port hull was curled back. Wires and strips of metal and tubing hung down from what had been the ceiling. It wasn’t until she spotted the chairs that she realized she was looking at the front end of the craft, or at least what was left of it. A portion of the floor of the mid-section was still attached.

  The nose of the craft was flattened, crushed back against what had been the control console until she had to wonder how Gabriel and Gideon had managed to walk away from it.

  The moment that thought clicked in her mind, though, a flood of images followed. She’d been in no state to note their condition, not consciously. Unconsciously, her mind had collected the images. They hadn’t walked away without a scratch. Both of them had been torn and bloody, limping, moving stiffly in pain.

  And they’d still come to find her before they’d even tried to do anything about their own wounds. Twisting her head to search for them, she saw Jerico and Gabriel carefully sorting through the wreckage. There was no sign of Gideon and panic gripped her.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Gideon!”

  Both Jerico and Gabriel whirled at her call. Dropping the items they’d found, they hurried toward her. Gabriel reached her first. “You must not call out!” he said, his voice harsh, urgent as he dropped to his knees beside her.

  Bronte’s heart fluttered uncomfortably in her chest. “Why?”

  Jerico and Gabriel exchanged a look. “The trogs will have seen the crash. They will be searching for us.”

  Whatever, or whoever, the trogs were, Bronte had a feeling she didn’t want them to find her if they made Jerico and Gabriel uneasy. “Where’s Gideon?”

  “He followed the path the craft tore through the jungle to search for our weapons.”

  Bronte frowned, battling the growing, nameless fear. “He went off alone? Without a weapon?”

  She could tell by the look on their faces that they didn’t understand her alarm. “He took the laser pistol,” Jerico supplied finally.

  She tried to sit up. Gabriel caught her shoulders to push her down again but it wasn’t necessary. The moment she tried, fiery pain seared through her. She went limp, trying to catch her breath.

  “You must not move yet,” Gabriel said gruffly. “The wounds have only begun to close. You will open them again.”

  “What happened?”

  “We crashed.”

  Bronte closed her eyes. She’d forgotten what it was like to get any information out of them, especially when they were trying to keep her in the dark, and she suspected they were.

  “Are you hungry?”

  She wasn’t, but she nodded when Jerico asked anyway, knowing she should eat something. She wasn’t just injured, she was so weak it took an effort to do anything at all. She knew she’d lost a lot of blood and she hadn’t taken in food or water in a very long time.

  “We can not build a fire,” Jerico said apologetically when he returned a few minutes later. “So there is no way to heat or cook food.”

  Because of the trogs—who were probably out looking for them—and they couldn’t leave because they were afraid to move her. They didn’t have to tell her that. She would’ve known even if she hadn’t been a doctor and well aware of just how bad her injuries were.

  She should be dead, she realized abruptly, not just weak and in pain. She’d been impaled by a flying piece of the disintegrating craft, pinned to her seat by it, and there was no doubt the internal damage would have to have been extensive when something that big had gone all the way through her.

  She would be dead except that Gideon and Jerico and Gabriel had risked their own lives to give her nanos, slashed their arms to force the microscopic bots to the surface and milked them from their bodies and into hers. As vague and mixed up as her memories were because of the shock, she recalled enough to know that they’d been injured badly enough to be in serious need of their nanos themselves quite aside from their own blood lost from injuries that had made sacrificing more to help her life threatening for them.

  She could see they’d finally gotten around to tending their own wounds after they’d done what they could for her, but she could also see that both Jerico and Gabriel were showing signs of a good deal of trauma. Aside from the numerous blood soaked bandages they were sporting, their coloring wasn’t even close to their usual healthy glow. Both of them looked nearly as pale and washed out as she felt and she knew Gideon was in no better shape.

  Instead of taking the food and water Jerico held out, she lifted a hand to explore the place along her mid-section where she’d seen the metal sticking out of her. It was bandaged but even the light pressure of her hand made it hurt deep inside of her. Vaguely, she recalled being jostled until she’d felt like screaming, or crying because she’d been too weak by then to scream, and realized they’d been bandaging her wounds.

  And her leg.

  She lifted her head to look down at herself but discovered she was covered with the blanket. She knew, though, that her leg was broken, as well. They’d realigned the bone and braced her leg with something.

  She looked up at Jerico and Gabriel, feeling a mixture of gratitude and something else that was difficult to pin down. They’d saved her life—and Gideon. He was the one who’d thought to try to give her their nanos—because he hadn’t been able to bring himself to try to use the laser to close the wound.

  Finally, offering them a smile since she couldn’t speak for the knot of emotion closing her throat, she took the food Jerico was offering. It was some sort of bread. Gabriel lifted her head and propped something soft beneath it and she pulled off a small piece and chewed it carefully. It wasn’t easy trying to eat flat on her back, but then she wasn’t that hungry anyway.

  “We will stay close. If you have need of anything, keep your voice low. We will hear you and come.” Setting the cup he’d brought with him within her reach, Jerico rose and left her. After flicking a gaze over her assessingly, Gabriel straightened and followed him and the two of them returned to sifting through the wreckage.

  She watched them while she struggled to swallow as much of the food and water as she could, trying to piece everything together in her mind.

  Something had hit the craft, something pretty big to have damaged it as badly as it had, a meteor undoubtedly, though she wondered how it had gotten so close before the proximity alarm had sounded. The system wouldn’t have warned them at all if had been malfunctioning, she didn’t suppose, but there most have been something wrong with the detection range. Either that or something had caused the meteor to abruptly change course.

  They hadn’t gotten the chance to get out a call for help because the collision had destroyed communications.

  That explained why they were still here. The command center had to know, though, that the ship had been damaged. Surely they would be looking? Surely they would’ve been able to track the descent at least part of the way and have some idea of their general location?

  Unless they thought the ship had been destroyed?

  She dismissed the fear that caused her. Gideon, Jerico, and Gabriel would take care of her. Despite their rowdiness in general, it hadn’t escaped her that the moment there was a threat, they’d instantly responded with cool headed military precision and they’d managed to get the craft on the ground without killing everyone on board. As little as she knew about piloting a craft, she knew that had been a hell of a feat in and of itself. They’d had almost no control over it, had had to improvise the usage of what they had left in ways it had ne
ver been intended.

  They might be flawed in a lot of ways, but she could not have been in better hands in the situation they were in.

  It was almost with surprise that she realized that she had absolute faith, not only in their abilities but in their dedication to taking care of her.

  The thing that worried her was that she was the one element in the equation that could bring about disaster. If they’d been acting strictly on logic, they would’ve realized that. Her injuries and her human weaknesses were a threat to their survival. True, they’d been badly injured, too, but they were not only many times stronger than even the strongest humans, they had nanos to help them recover many times faster from the severest injuries.

  She hadn’t needed Gideon to tell her how hard it was to kill one of them. They were virtually indestructible. As long as they could prevent themselves from getting so much damage so fast that their nanos couldn’t repair them quickly enough, and their speed, strength, and agility insured that, they couldn’t under most circumstances. The crash might be the closest they’d ever come to reaching critical threat—certainly would have been if the trogs had been close enough to attack before they’d had a little time to recover.

  Without her to worry about, they could’ve been far away by now.

  Instead, knowing there was a threat out there, they were forced to wait until they thought it safe to move her.

  Or they had chosen to wait.

  She wondered if that was because of their orders to protect her or if personal choice had figured in to it at all, but she didn’t want to examine that too closely. She wanted to think at least a part of it had been because it mattered to them, that she mattered to them.

  The threat could only be indigenous life, probably primitive, which also probably translated to dangerous savages. Gideon had been in touch with the command center before they’d lost communications. This had to be their destination world, and yet they’d gone down beyond the civilization the Cyborgs had created, a very long way, otherwise they would have seen some sign of a rescue party by now and Gideon and the others wouldn’t be worried about being attacked.

  They weren’t worried for their own sake, she realized. They were concerned about protecting her if there was an attack.

  If they were concerned for themselves, Gideon wouldn’t have gone off alone, virtually unarmed, and Gabriel and Jerico wouldn’t have been standing guard over her completely unarmed except for whatever makeshift weapons they could grab up.

  Which meant she was even more of a threat to their safety. They were not only going to be slowed by her, they were very likely going to be forced into a confrontation because of her, possibly by overwhelming numbers and very likely by savages better armed than they were. Weakened and injured as she was, she knew it could take her weeks or months to recover, even with the help of their nanos—if she ever completely recovered from it.

  And she couldn’t dismiss the fact that the nanos hadn’t been designed for human physiology and might not be up to the task of fixing her even if there were enough to repair the damage.

  She didn’t want to think about the possibilities of permanent, irreversible damage at the moment, though. She had enough to worry about.

  Like whether or not the nanos would be able to prevent infection from killing her or if the rod had so severely damaged her intestines she would die slowly of the poisons seeping into her body, or if there’d been any other vital organ so damaged it couldn’t be repaired. And saying she actually survived, her reproductive organs were still in tact enough to have children.

  They hadn’t said anything to her about that, not directly, but she’d overheard enough to know that that was their single most powerful motivation for wanting a mate—her—the hope that they might be able to have off-spring.

  If it came to that, she had wanted a child, or perhaps two or three. She’d even obtained a license to reproduce, which had granted her permission to have her birth control surgery reversed. The fact that she hadn’t managed to find anyone she’d wanted to father a child hadn’t changed that. She’d expected to find a man, eventually, that met her standards—or came close.

  Unwilling to dwell on those depressing thoughts, she struggled to shift enough to watch Gabriel and Jerico work, chafing at not being able to do anything at all to help. She realized after a little while that their main focus was on recovering as much of the things from her office as they could find. Noticing she was watching, they began to bring the things closer and form a growing pile.

  It occurred to her after a while that they were prioritizing what needed to be taken.

  “How are we going to get all of this back to civilization?” she finally asked Gabriel.

  He paused. “We can not leave anything of importance here. The trogs will take what they want and destroy the rest.”

  Dismay filled her. They were going to be bogged down not only with her but all this, too? “I can manage without most of this,” she said decisively. “Focus on the instruments and medicines. Forget the books—I know what’s in most of them anyway. Forget the files and the larger pieces of equipment. Chances are they’re too badly damaged to be of any use anyway. Most of it was fairly delicate electronics. Even if it looks like it might not have too much damage, it probably has.”

  Nodding, looking vastly relieved, Gabriel returned, discussed it briefly with Jerico and they began sorting the pile they’d already collected.

  Gideon returned late in the afternoon. Bronte was so glad to see him she had to fight the urge to weep with relief. Seeing she was awake and watching him, he tossed two long, gleaming blades to Jerico and Gabriel and strode toward her purposefully, crouching beside her and examining her carefully with his gaze. Bronte took her own inventory. If he’d been wearing bandages at all, he’d already discarded most of them. Dozens of dark pink patches on his chest and arms, legs, face and neck told of newly closed wounds. One on his thigh and the place where he’d cut himself to help her were still bandaged. There was a cut extending across his forehead from his hairline, as well.

  He was wearing something she’d never seen him wear before. Something like a belt crossed his chest from shoulder to waist and seemed to extend to his back. Above his left shoulder, she saw a metallic handle of some kind.

  He had tossed two long blades to Gabriel and Jerico. Undoubtedly, that was what this was, a sheathe to carry his own blade.

  Abruptly self-conscious about her own appearance, she averted her gaze, wishing she could just pull the cover over her head. “I must look terrible,” she said uncomfortably.

  His gaze flickered over her face. “Far better than yesterday,” he said. “It is good that I did not yield to the impulse to secure you in Jerico’s seat. That side took the brunt of the impact and I do not believe you would have survived it.”

  Considering the battering she’d taken, she thought he was most likely right. It occurred to her even as she realized that that it was not mere chance that her side of the craft had been spared the brunt of the impact. “It took the brunt because you made sure it did,” she said.

  A flicker of discomfort crossed his features. “It was a logical decision. Given that I had little time to assess the situation, I feel that I made the only decision I could have. Jerico and I were more likely to survive than you, and I knew that if we did not you would have Gabriel to take care of you.”

  A knot of emotion hardened in her throat. “It didn’t occur to you, I suppose, that I might not want to survive if you didn’t?”

  He frowned, giving her a strange look.

  “I would have grieved if anything had happened to either you or Jerico, whether you believe it or not. I’m very glad that you’re alright.”

  Confusion, doubt, and pleasure flickered across his features in rapid succession, and then more doubt. “Why?” he asked curiously.

  Dismay filled her. She didn’t know why she’d interpreted everything he’d done as signs he cared about her when she knew better, knew he was still far more
a creature of pure logic than emotion. Not only did he not feel any of the things that had begun to grow inside of her, he didn’t understand why she would feel them. Instead of trying to answer his question and possibly embarrassing herself more, she changed the subject. “Is that a … knife you have strapped to your back?”

  He frowned, obviously not happy that she’d ignored the question, but he allowed the subject to drop. “Of a sort. It is called a sword.”

  “You had those on the ship?”

  “We always have them with us, though they are only used, or mostly, in confrontations with the natives of this world.”

  Bronte eyed the thing doubtfully. “I think I’d rather have a laser pistol.”

  A faint smile curled his lips. “You could not wield a sword. They are far heavier than the pistols—and nigh as long as you are.”

  She gave him a look. “I’m not that short!”

  His smile broadened. “Not quite. But I am that tall, and this blade was designed for one such as I am.”

  “I still think the pistols would be more effective,” she said, mostly because she didn’t like the idea of anyone getting close enough to any of ‘her’ men for them to use the lethal looking blades.

  “That is because you know nothing about what we must deal with. The trogs swarm when they attack and, most often, they are upon you before you know that they are there. The pistols are of no use, or very little, in such an attack, and I would far prefer to meet blade with blade—for that is what they use—than to find myself with nothing but my bare hands to fend off their blades.”

  She stared at him unhappily at that, almost sorry she’d gotten that much information out of him. It couldn’t be worse knowing the danger of the situation, though, than not having a clue until she found herself in the middle of such a battle. Not that she thought anything could prepare her for such a thing, but the information was certainly inspiration to do all she could to help avoid the possibility.