Avion blinked, and the image glitched.

Wait a second. Image?

His eyelids were shut over his cybernetic orbs, but that was normal during a reboot. What had him cautiously optimistic was he no longer stared at a dark screen. Numbers scrolled against the inside of his eyelids as his digital receptors came back on line.

Will I get to see again?

Was it totally unmanly to admit the answer scared him? He’d definitely lose his cyborg—scourge-of-the-galaxy—membership card if his brothers ever found out. Yet, unmanly or not, he couldn’t help the trepidation. What if it didn’t work? What if—

He slowly forced his lids open.

Light made him blink. Shut. Open. More light. A ceiling with a bright lamp suspended.

I can see!

He angled his head to his left and noted the empty bed alongside him. He looked the other way and let out a very emasculating and human sound. “Eep!”

Hovering only inches from his face was Seth, a wide grin plastered on his mug. “Surprise! Aren’t you glad to see me?”

Not exactly. He’d have preferred someone else. “Hey, Seth.”

“Dude, look at you, looking at me. The rising dead. It’s a miracle. I’ll admit a part of me was skeptical about the whole blood transfusion thing.”

Join the club. He wasn’t the only skeptic. As he propped himself to a sitting position, Avion winced. “Worked, but I’m still only partially fixed. While I might not be knocking on death’s door, it’s taking time for the nanos to reach the point they were before.” While nanos could do wondrous things, replicating themselves by the thousands, even with him imbibing huge amounts of food—ores, liquids, anything really—would take time. While vastly improved, his damaged system was far from repaired.

“So you take it slow for a few days. It’s good to see you back.” Seth leaned in for a hug.

Avion allowed it. While he’d never admit it aloud, he did find tactile pleasure in a hug. And, besides, Seth wasn’t a guy to piss off. He might seem nice on the outside, but one day he’d go postal. When he did, Avion wanted to be on his don’t-kill list so he could join him for some mayhem.

Surprised? Not to people who knew him before he’d gotten damaged. Avion liked living on the edge. His illness might have made him more cautious, but in truth, he was a male of action.

Speaking of action, this sick bay wouldn’t see any. As a pilot—and a damned good one too—Avion should be out in a fighter jet, protecting the ship.

First, though, he needed to locate some clothes. “Dude, where’s my pants?”

“Incinerated. Seriously, Avion, you really need to learn to step away from the blood spray, not into it.”

Avion snorted at the advice. “Your neat freak fetish is showing.”

“I’m not neat. I’m practical. Less blood means less cleaning.”

“You spy models are weird.”

“Says the guy with the girlfriend who can stop bullets. So jealous.”

“She’s mine.” Possessive? Damned straight. Avion was quite intrigued by his vixen. They shared a bond that had started the first time they’d touched minds. Then hands. He couldn’t wait to see what they touched next.

“I think everyone has clued in by now that she’s your girlfriend.”

Was she? He’d technically never asked her. “We’ve not officially gone on a date yet.” Or kissed.

“Dude, trust me when I say she is totally into you. But I’m going to go out on a limb and say she’d probably like you better if you got less blood splatter on yourself. I mean really. Wear an apron if you have to. And you might want to think about something sexier to meet her in for the first time than a tissue paper robe where your ass hangs out, albeit, despite its scrawniness, I guess it’s not bad.”

“Don’t hate me because I have awesome glutes. Hate me because I’m better endowed.”

Seth snorted. “You wish.”

“Just ask your wife.” Avion smirked, and then watched as Seth’s face went through a myriad emotions, most of them involving jealousy.

“Not funny, dude.”

Avion laughed. “I never touched her, but watching you blow smoke from your ears at the thought is awesome.”

“Fuck you,” Seth grumbled, followed by a hand gesture. “If you weren’t still recovering…”

Then Seth would probably wipe the floor with him. The spy model had some killer fighting skills, part of his assassin training.

Good thing Seth deemed him too damaged to spar. Avion doubted he could have held on for long. While his condition improved, it didn’t do so quickly. Pain still lanced through him, the chest wound taking its time to heal, but the bruises covering a good portion of his body at least no longer pulsed with rhythmic pain.

In agony or not, Avion would not let the weak state of his body stop him. He was going to that bridge. He would set eyes on Lilith so he’d finally have an image to go with the sensations he’d accumulated since their meeting.

Then he’d go blow some shit up. Destruction always made him feel better, especially when it made a pretty explosion of light and a booming sound. He thought it had something to do with a fondness for fireworks. While his memories of the time when he was still one hundred percent human were hazy, he did seem to correlate happiness with the bright sparkles falling from a dark sky.

Knowing the ship well, having traveled on it previously, Avion took all the shortcuts he knew to get to the bridge. The elevator whisked him two floors while a series of moving sidewalks increased the speed of his pace down the many corridors. After passing through several open doorways, which was unusual as Aramus usually kept them shut, he stepped into the open command center.

He turned a puzzled gaze on the door, which did not slide shut even after he entered. Was it a ship-wide malfunction?

Not his department. He took a quick moment to get a feel for the situation. Kentry, a cyborg he’d gone on a few missions with, a good, solid guy, manned a console. When it came to navigator and communications, Kentry was the expert. On the other side of the bridge, in what they labeled the offensive zone, where all the cool buttons were, sat Adam. Adam was the former Earth cyborg rebel leader. Recent events had forced him to flee the planet with Laura, a human scientist turned cyborg.

Anastasia, Seth’s wife and ultimate weakness, stood before a massive view screen, which spanned more than twenty feet. Currently on display was a map of their current surroundings within a few thousand miles. Anastasia bore an intense look of concentration as she zoomed in and out of sections for closer peeks of the galactic space between them and the enemy ships.

Targets spotted. Mission: destroy the enemy.

How his hands itched to grip the controls of a fighter jet, manipulating the tight loops and arcs as he chased the enemy down and, with precisely fired shots, took them out. He was ready to run out of here, suit up, and go on the attack! But all good soldiers needed permission to fly, and on this ship, that came from one person: the commander.

Avion let his gaze finally track over to Aramus, who lounged in his seat, arguing with a woman who could be only Lilith.

Her appearance hit him like Seth’s always perfectly aimed fist. Air whooshed from him. His heart stalled. And he might have wavered on his feet. She definitely caused an impact.

She’s an angel. At least that was his first impression. There she stood, her head slightly cocked, an ethereal presence in her form-fitting silver jumpsuit with her platinum tresses hanging around her shoulders in a long, smooth expanse with jagged ends. Neat and yet untended. A strange dichotomy, much like the rest of her.

Petite compared to him, slim of build, so delicate appearing and yet the toughest woman, make that person, he’d ever met.

So much power in that tiny body. He didn’t just refer to power and control over the functions of her body and the elements around her, though. He meant more a strange hold over his emotions.

She’s mine. He saw her, and he wanted her. Not just because she was beautiful. He’d already suspected that even when he was blind. He wanted her, now, with a terrible fierceness because he no longer died. He could now entertain the possibility of seduction. The possibility of a future with this fascinating female. Something he’d never imagined before but now wanted.

Bright eyes met his. He might have gasped at the celestial storm clouds brewing in her gaze, less a color than an impression of many hues.

Some think my eyes are uncanny, she mind-whispered, having caught his stray thought.

He’d have to watch that. They were closely connected. He didn’t want to frighten her with any of his more intense emotions—or desires.

“Lilith, you are a vision of loveliness,” he said out loud. Cyborg cool card be damned. This declaration fell under the heading of, I’m claiming this woman, hands off, or you’ll need robotic replacements.

A small smile graced her lips. “Your vision has returned. That is pleasing news.”

“It is. In no time at all I will be back to my regular self.”

“Blah, blah, so glad to hear it and all that other sentimental crap. While it’s great you got your lazy ass out of bed, even an idiot could see you’re not at one hundred percent capacity. You should head to your quarters and rest until you’re at full strength,” Aramus ordered. “I’ve got a feeling we’re going to have a bumpy journey, so I need everyone in tiptop shape.”

Aramus wanted to banish him? Like hell. “It shouldn’t be long before my damage is repaired. You, however, need me now. The enemy has been sighted and is begging for some TCL.” Tough cyborg love. “Let me take a jet out for a spin and see if I can’t punch us a hole in that line of aliens.” Just let me get my hands on the controls to a fighter plane. Nothing like executing daring maneuvers for a pilot to feel truly alive again.

Aramus said, “No. Did your brain turn to fucking mush while your nanos were malfunctioning? Less than half an hour ago you were dying and practically a vegetable.”

Lilith’s nose wrinkled in confusion. Utterly adorable. He could have kissed it. “Why do you compare him to a herbaceous plant? He is flesh-based.”

“I meant vegetable as in no brain waves. Almost dead.”

“That makes no rational sense.”

“I can see her confusion,” interjected Kentry at his console. “I mean, given we are cyborg, and that we have a rather hefty ratio of metal, shouldn’t we instead say he was practically a mineral?”

A funny noise left Lilith. Then another. She giggled. But apparently she didn’t mean to.

Avion wasn’t the only one staring as she slapped a hand over her mouth.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“My mouth won’t obey,” she said between snorts. “It is stuck in a loop of mirth.” She cackled. “A mineral instead of a vegetable.”

The fact that she couldn’t help herself twitched Avion’s lips. Aramus guffawed.

“You know. It’s true. I always knew you had a rock for a brain. Look at this insane idea of yours to confront the enemy, which outnumbers you eight to one.”

“I might have a rock for a brain instead of a potato, but I know how to fly,” grumbled Avion.

“No one said you didn’t, but what if you relapse? What if they take you down? Or capture you?

“You make it sound so negative. What about the possibility I could disable a few and find us a spot to slide through?”

“With his help, we have an increase of success that rises from twenty-three percent to thirty-seven,” Lilith announced in a smooth monotone.

“See, I could make a difference.”

“Maybe you could, but what are you gonna do if you don’t make it back to the ship before your girlfriend here sends us slingshotting from a forming black hole using some freaky physics-based theory that might kill us all?”

“Probability says the odds of utter destruction of this craft are only seven percent.”

“I’d say those are great odds,” Avion enthused. “Come on, Aramus. You heard the girl. I raise our odds to thirty-seven.”

“The answer is still no. But, since you think you’re so hot on a gun, you can join Adam here on weapons.”

Not quite the fun he’d hoped for but better than nothing. It didn’t mean he didn’t sulk. In a manly way of course, by cursing aloud, “Fucking killjoy.”

“I heard that.”

“I should hope so, else I’d have you demoted for being defective,” Avion muttered.

“The captain is operating without glitch, although not at full capacity. None of you are because of the neural inhibitors.” Lilith’s announcement met with many inquiring gazes.

Since their escape, there’d been too much happening to really question Lilith. It was, however, becoming more and more apparent that there was a wealth of knowledge tucked in her head. She proved a fascinating puzzle he wanted to unravel.

“The neural what? Forget it. I’m sure you’ll just make me want to find the nearest compactor so I can stick my head in it and squeeze. You can explain later, once we’ve made it out of here and I’ve located copious amounts of alcohol. Right now, we’ve got a battle to plan. Other than sending our resident rock on a suicide mission, what ideas do we have for avoiding the mess up ahead?”

“What if we veered and headed the other way?” Adam asked.

“That will bring us back too close to Earth and its ships. Not to mention the other side of the solar system leads into that empty abyss. We’d have nowhere to hide, no place to land, nothing at all to sustain us for years.”

“According to my history, a very large black hole swallowed most of those galactic systems before folding in on itself and wiping out the rest,” Lilith explained.

“So, in other words, avoid that direction,” Kentry summarized. “What if we dove into the crust on Pluto and tunneled at a random angle through the frozen gas layers and popped out, hopefully away from them enough we could outrun them.”

“That would only work if we could be sure they couldn’t detect us, which, given we’re dealing with unknown alien technology, isn’t a given.”

Anastasia whirled from the screen, but she had a question rather than a concrete suggestion. “Lilith, that thing you did back at the Earth base, where you put up that weird shield that deflected and redirected the enemies’ fire, can you repeat that? But on a larger scale with this ship?”

“Let me evaluate.” Lilith cocked her head, and her eyes went slightly out of focus. “The mass I’d have to defend is too vast, and our speed too great. It requires much expended energy and neural capacity to focus for such a task.”

“So, in other words, you can’t do it.”

“I can provide some defense, just not in the fashion you described. What I can do, for a short amount of time, is erect some additional kinetic shielding on the areas of the ship that are most likely to get damaged. If Avion and Adam can provide accurate and steady fire and eliminate some of the threats, then, while I hold the shielding, we should, barring unforeseen scenarios, make it through the alien’s defensive line. Once clear, the commander must boost the ship’s speed to four times our current level and aim for the following coordinates.” She rattled off a stream of numbers.

“Four times the speed? Are you freaking nuts?”

“According to the psychiatrists, yes. Certifiably so and a danger to those around me.”

Lilith’s stark announcement had them all gaping at her.

Only Avion caught the sad undercurrent of her mind.

Aramus guffawed. “Girl, you might be freaky, but I think you’re going to fit in just fine.”

Insanity wasn’t a flaw when among cyborgs. It just made her one of them.