Eleven
Vector expected rejection. He expected pity.
He didn’t expect anger from his little human.
“I’m an idiot because I allowed myself to be damaged?” He struggled to follow her processing.
“You’re an idiot because you thought I’d care about your feet.” She rolled her eyes. He’d only allow his female to show him that lack of respect. “You’re a fierce warrior, a skilled captain, a leader other males follow. You make me hot.” She ran her hands over her naked body, cupping her breasts, caressing her stomach, delving between her thighs. “All over.”
Frag. His mouth dried. He wanted her. Again. Always.
“You’re tall and broad with muscles that go on forever and that sexy gray skin.” She shivered, her nipples taut, her arousal scenting the air. “I risked my lifespan to meet you based on your voice alone and when I saw you, I knew I had to have you.” Her hands returned to her hips, drawing his gaze there. “I don’t care that you have no feet.”
“I have feet.” Vector sat on the edge of the sleeping support, the surface dipping under his weight. “But they aren’t mine.”
He was a pieced together cyborg, an abomination. She’d understand that when she saw the feet attached to him.
He unfastened his boots, paused, was unable to remove the footwear. No one had ever seen his damage.
“Are your replacement feet tiny?” His female claimed the spot beside him, lowering her bare ass to the surface. “Is that the issue?” She wiggled, her hip brushing against his, her touch tormenting him. “You had to use the feet of a J Model and they’re much smaller.”
What was she talking about? He turned his head and stared at his female. “No.”
“Oh.” She sighed, appearing disappointed.
Because he didn’t have tiny feet, feet belonging to another cyborg model. Vector shook his head. His female’s brain operated with different circuits.
He slipped his boots off the feet and braced himself for her reaction.
“They’re shiny.”
Vector gazed down at the feet attached to him. They were shiny. His skin stopped at his ankle, at the end of him. The feet consisted of the metal frame and internal circuits. “They’re monstrosities.”
“I must like monstrosities.” Her voice was husky. “Because I think they’re extremely sexy.”
She found them sexy? He glanced at them and then at her. There was no mocking in her expression. “They’re not mine.”
“They’re replacement feet.” She said that as though there was nothing wrong with it. “Why did you remove your original feet? Was it due to the insects?”
His mouth fell open. How had his clever female derived the cause?
“We were fighting on Furud One. It was a disaster.” The words rushed out of him. “The guns we were given were defective. We had to use them as clubs. The Humanoid Alliance didn’t relay enough information about the terrain, about the enemy. We eliminated our assigned targets but we lost eighty percent of our warriors.”
They had walked into traps, were ambushed again and again. His brethren, his friends, had been killed by attacks that could have been anticipated if they’d had more details.
The Humanoid Alliance had that information but hadn’t shared it. Cyborgs couldn’t request it, not without revealing they had free will. Machines didn’t question their manufacturers.
So they had no choice. They had to march into battle without that preparation, knowing many of them would die.
Kasia twined her left arm around Vector’s right and rested her head on his shoulder. “If I had been there, I would have shared the information.”
He was glad she hadn’t been there. Her data sharing would have put his female at risk. “After the battle, we could have returned to our ships using terrain we’d already navigated. We opted to take a shortcut.”
“That was surprisingly reckless of you.” She teased.
“We paid for that recklessness.” And it disturbed Vector that she might, some planet rotation, pay for hers. “We crossed a field covered with tiny red insects.” That raised no alarms. Insects often swarmed during battle, disturbed by the vibrations in the ground. “They were Furudian fire burrowers.”
Kasia wrinkled her nose. “I’ve never heard of them.”
“We hadn’t either.” He and his brethren had lacked that information also. “They’re only found on that planet.” The Furudian fire burrowers required that specific environment to survive. “They’re fast.” And he and his brethren had been arrogant. Cyborgs were built to withstand projectiles. How could a tiny creature harm them? “They swept up my brethren’s forms, consuming everything, skin, flesh, frame, mechanics, circuits.”
His female’s eyes widened. “How did you survive?”
“The first warrior to enter the field was able to transmit before he died.” He owed that warrior his lifespan. “I was the last warrior, heard that warning, was positioned near a tree.” That series of coincidences saved him. “I pulled myself out of the Furudian fire burrowers’ reach and hacked off my feet.”
She touched the circle of scarred flesh around his ankles. How she could bear to touch it, he didn’t know. “You couldn’t save your feet?”
“My soles were already damaged.” He’d been tortured by the Humanoid Alliance, riddled with projectiles during battle, had nearly lost his right arm during one skirmish. Nothing had equaled the agony of the Furudian fire burrower attack. It had felt as through acid was being drilled through the heart of him, a twisting pain he yearned to forget yet accepted he never would. “The insects were too small, too quick, and there were too many of them to remove.”
“I wouldn’t have had the strength to hack off my feet.” His female said, her voice lilting with admiration.
For him. For a male who couldn’t save his brethren, who was defective.
Vector shook his head, trying to clear his processors. “You would have found the strength. The choice was hacking off my feet and staying alive or remaining whole and dying.” He’d acted out of desperation, not bravery. “I stayed in that tree until the swarm passed. Everyone else died.”
He’d watched helpless, unable to do anything, as his brethren, his friends, were consumed by the Furudian fire burrowers, eaten alive. They had reached toward the sky with their hands, sucked under by a writhing mass of red, their screams echoing through the transmission lines, pulling at his soul.
“You couldn’t have saved them.” Kasia pressed her lips to his shoulder, that touch bringing him back to the present. “You barely saved yourself.”
“I could have tried.” He should have done something but even now, he didn’t know how he could have defeated their tiny foes.
“Trying would have been too reckless even for me.” His female gave him a small smile. “The tree must have adapted to its surroundings, formed some sort of natural defense against the Furudian fire burrowers. Those Humanoid Alliance bastards must have been thrilled with the disaster. They had a new weapon with the insects and a new defense against that weapon with the tree.”
“According to their databases, the Humanoid Alliance tested a missile prototype on Furud One less than a planet rotation after the battle.” That had angered Vector also. His brethren had died fighting for terrain the Humanoid Alliance planned to decimate. “Nothing living survived that testing.”
“That’s bad for that planet but good for the universe.” Kasia stroked his arm. “The Humanoid Alliance would have created horrific weapons with those discoveries.”
Vector agreed. They would have done that. “Once the swarm passed, I dropped to the ground.” The impact had been jarring, pain shooting up the bloody stumps he called legs, almost shorting out his processors.
“Had the nanocybotics replaced your feet?” His female rubbed small circles into his knuckles, round and round, the contact soothing him.
“Replacing my feet was outside their abilities.” Nanocybotics couldn’t manufacture entire body parts. “I crawled to the battlefield.”
That journey had seemed endless. His fingers had been worn down to the frame, the silver covered with red, by the time he reached those killing fields.
But he had no other choice. A warrior unable to walk was a dead warrior.
“Bastion was the first dead C Model I encountered on the battlefield.” Vector hadn’t the energy to crawl to another warrior. “I detached his feet, stripped them to the frame, removing the skin and flesh.”
Bastion’s nanocybotics and blood streamed between his fingers. His lifeless eyes stared accusingly at him. ‘What the frag are you doing, V?’ The warrior seemed to be asking.
“I sliced my wounds open, trying to stimulate the nanocybotics.” That pain had been for nothing. It hadn’t worked. “And I attached the feet.”
It was something their Humanoid Alliance handlers would have done, but it had been distasteful, had felt wrong, disrespectful to Bastion.
“He was a friend.” His female deduced.
“We were manufactured in the same batch, had trained together, fought side by side all of our lifespans.” C Models rarely enjoyed flying but they both loved it, would compete to be the warriors at the helm of their shuttle craft. “His death was the reason I was the last warrior to arrive at the field.”
His friend had been hit too hard to repair. Vector had stayed with him until his processors went dark, ensuring he didn’t die alone, and then he had reluctantly left Bastion’s corpse, rejoined the other warriors.
Only to see them also die, eaten alive by insects.
“Bastion was the reason you survived the Furudian fire burrower attack,” Vector’s perceptive female murmured. “Your friend’s last act was to save your life.”
“That is a claim he would have made.” If Bastion had survived, Vector would have been obligated to give him the captain’s chair for that act alone. “After I attached his feet, I had no choice. I had to escape. Being defective, I would have been decommissioned by the Humanoid Alliance.”
“How are you defective? Other warriors have replaced their parts.” His female knocked her foot against one of the feet attached to him. “I’ve heard transmissions confirming that.”
“Those parts were incorporated into their bodies.” No one could detect the repairs. “Their nanocybotics accepted the change.” He gazed down at the feet. “My nanocybotics rejected it.”
“Too much time had passed.”
Vector nodded. He’d waited too long. “These feet will be separate from me forever. They don’t smell like me.” He breathed deeply and wrinkled his nose. “Anyone gazing at them will know I’m not fully functional.”
“You’re fully functional.” She wiggled away from him. Vector resisted the urge to hold her to him. “Put your feet up here.” She patted the surface of the sleeping support.
“They’re not my feet.” Vector complied, swinging to the side, propping the feet upward. “They’ll never be my feet.” He’d be defective his entire lifespan.
“They’re Bastion’s feet.” Kasia grabbed a cleaning cloth. “You’ll always have a part of your friend with you.” She stroked the metal frame, polishing the feet with the fabric square. “Wherever you go, he goes.”
Bastion would have liked that. Vector studied the feet, seeing them in a new light. “Other warriors would view me as being defective.” Even if he grew to accept them, his brethren wouldn’t. “Defective males aren’t captains of warships.” He’d lose the respect of his males.
“Your males don’t follow you because of your feet.” She flicked the cloth to renew it. “They follow you because you have honor, strength, intelligence.” She skimmed the fabric around the scars circling his ankles, the marks denoting the end of him. “You would die for them and they realize that.”
He would die for her. Did she realize that?
Vector watched his female as she cleaned the feet, Bastion’s feet. She didn’t appear at all repulsed by them, touching the metal, showing no hesitation.
Not that his female ever hesitated over anything. His lips twisted. And now his reckless little human knew his secret shame. “No one else knows about this.”
“I won’t tell anyone.” Her gaze met his, her brown eyes reflecting understanding. “I would never hurt you in that way.”
Part of him realized that but he liked hearing the words. Vector’s shoulders lowered. “You were wrong about one thing.”
“Only one?” She laughed, the sound making his insides bubble with joy.
“You were wrong about one thing concerning me.” He amended. “I have very little honor. If I had honor, I would have allowed another male, a whole male, to claim you.”
“You are a whole male.” She tossed the cleaning cloth at him.
He caught it, folded it neatly, set it aside.
“And I don’t want another male.” She pressed Bastion’s feet against her chest. “Your feet make me desire you more, not less.”
Vector gazed at her with disbelief.
“They’re proof you’re a badass,” she clarified. “When you decide to do something, like stay alive, you do it. I can count on that decision.”
“I am a badass.” That was the truth. He could outfight almost any being.
His female’s mirth filled the chamber once more and he wondered how he ever lived without it. “You are.” She playfully pinched one of the silver toes. “After escaping, did you meet up with some of your brethren? Is that how you removed the tracking device from your spine?”
“I didn’t know about the tracking devices.” The cyborg council, trying to prevent mass rebellion, hadn’t shared that information. “I reached the border of cyborg-controlled space before having the tracking devices removed.” Vengeance, the C Model warrior on the council, assisted him, admonishing him for his recklessness. “I could have led the Humanoid Alliance directly to the Homeland, killed every warrior, destroyed everything my brethren had worked to create.” Vector winced. “It was mere luck that they didn’t monitor the tracking devices.”
“I suspect it was more.” Kasia rested her chin on Bastion’s toes. “The Humanoid Alliance commander gave you defective guns, didn’t relay the information you required to defeat the enemy, bombed the planet before investigating what happened to your brethren, didn’t monitor the tracking devices. He wanted you all to die.”
That made no sense. Vector lifted his eyebrows. “He could have simply had us decommissioned.” They would have been stripped for parts.
Decommissioning was a slow and painful death. Any warrior would prefer to die on the battlefield, weapons in his hands, doing what he was manufactured to do—killing the enemy.
“If the commander had authorization to decommission you, he could have done that.” His female hugged Bastion’s feet to her, as though she was attempting to keep Vector safe, protect him from past dangers, that small sign of caring warming his chest. “If he didn’t have the authorization, he would have to make the deaths look accidental. Then he would have a reason to order newer models.”
That was a probable theory. Vector had heard the male speak of the new E Models, envy in his voice.
“Or it was all a coincidence.” His female shrugged. “That happens.”
It happened rarely. Vector pulled her onto his lap, sliding her bare skin over his legs, settling her slight curves against him.
“This is nice.” She sighed happily, snuggling closer to him, her satisfaction mirroring his.
He had found his female. She was beautiful, extremely intelligent, strong, brave. She accepted his mistakes, his defects. Vector curved his fingers over her flat stomach. She could be carrying his offspring at this very moment.
This female was his.
He’d disobey Power, rebel against the council, fight his fellow cyborgs, the remaining Humanoid Alliance forces, and the entire universe to keep her.