Chapter Six:

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Dommik turned around to see the girl swivel in the chair, her mouth parted in a gasp. Kat was still wrapped up in his jacket, hands disappeared into its sleeves, the hood still tied at her neck and framing her face.

If Gunner had seen her wild tendrils, he wasn’t sure if he could keep the other Cyborg from her. Gunner was created much like himself but with a different set of DNA and a different skeletal model under his skin. Dommik questioned who was more of freak: himself or Gunner, who had Jackal in his veins.

Marking and fucking and scavenging everything he set his eyes on.

Gunner was banned from governmental protected areas even though he worked the same job as Dommik. Stryker took his loads to port for an additional fee. It was a win-win situation for the people they work for, they didn’t have to deal with Gunner and Gunner got to keep his job and remain in the shadows.

“Roaches?” she asked, as her hands came out and untied her hood.

Of all the things she could have asked him. The invasion into his personal life, his quirks and freaks were no one’s business but his own. Dommik kept ahold of his restraint despite the anger burning through his veins while the animalistic part of him vibrated from within. Gunner had a way of making everything more complicated.

Dommik never wanted another human on his ship, had made sure he took every measure to garner the trust of the government and the EPED and now they demanded more than he wanted to give.

Her hair came free as the hood dropped around her neck.

He took a step toward her. His control splintered. He imagined her in nothing but his jacket, naked and shivering underneath as he slowly unzipped it from her body. Revealing her to his eyes, his hands, and his dick, inch by inch.

The metal plates in his body began to shift. The thing that made him something else. Something different. Dommik stopped, watching the girl’s eyes grow wide, a wince of fear and the silence that follows when all one’s air is exhaled from their lungs.

She checked him over. He stood up straighter. Kat shuffled in her chair.

The smell of her arousal hit him like a jackhammer and all thoughts of Gunner fell away. His nostrils flared.

He had scented it before with utter confusion, with the wind at his back, drifting the perfume away from him. Now he didn’t have the breeze and the snowdrifts to escape too. He only had his control. The smell grew stronger under his stare, his eyes locked at the covered crux of her sex. Her body adjusted, readying itself for his invasion, his cock jerked in response.

She wants me. Dommik burned and tempered.

“Do you like them?” he asked her, his lips flattening. He would ensure her disgust replaced the dew between her thighs. The truth often did that.

“Does anyone like them?” Kat made a face. “They carry disease and they infest. They’re resilient against most methods of pesticides.” She tugged the long sleeves of his jacket up her arms. Dommik clenched his fists. “And they’re impossible to get rid of. Why? Does this have something to do with the man on the console?”

“It has nothing to do with him,” he shot out. Why bring him up? Was her arousal brought on by his guns? Had he misread her attraction? “Hope, Katalina, you never encounter him again. He would have you on your knees and no other way.”

“He said he was a co-worker. Who is he and how did he freeze your systems?” She tried his patience. But they helped restrain his ardor. Dommik walked to the door, knowing Kat would follow him. He kept his pace slow so she stayed near.

If she wants to know about the roaches, I’ll show her the roaches.

They ended up at one of the many sealed doors around the large room. Each door held its own secret and those secrets now slept during the work shifts and now only got air time at night.

He looked back at Kat. “He has nothing to do with you but if you are so desperate to learn more, I’ll invite him over for dinner,” he snarled.

Her lips twitched. “Let me guess? I’ll be the food?” She let out a soft laugh. “Boy, would he regret eating me.” Something shifted in her voice and her brief mirth was replaced with sadness. “Invite him over for dinner, we’ll see who has the last laugh. Do Cyborgs eat?”

Dommik typed in a code and the door shot open. He stood in the doorway and challenged her to go through.

“We do eat.”

The light turned on and hundreds of creatures scurried about in confusion.

Her reaction was exactly what he had anticipated, down to the parted lips and hushed inhale of breath. She glanced at him then glanced back at the white room. Sterile and utilitarian with smaller glass enclosures throughout. Smaller cages. They did the same thing as the large ones but for an entirely different purpose. The girl walked past him, her arm brushed against his stomach and entered his ‘hobby’ room.

Kat spun toward him as the door closed at his back, green eyes that cut through his, wide and shocked. “You EAT roaches?”

Dommik let out a laugh. “No.”

“Thank god.”

The smell of her arousal was gone, filtered out through the sterilization system, and it wasn’t replaced. He felt its loss but it warred with his goal to keep her cold.

Why take what she would regret giving? He leaned against the closed door and watched as she tip-toed through the chamber.

When she made her first circlet around the room and passed him by without looking his way, he asked, “What do you think of my pets?” He rubbed his mouth, waiting for her answer. And it wasn’t because he asked her a question...but because he cared. The bugs were contained but they still created a festering image within their capsules. There were countless now within the cases and they belonged to him, not the EPED, but him.

“I don’t like them.”

“Is it?–”

“–I pity them.”

Dommik crouched in the corner and watched her. His arms settled over his bent knees. “Why?” Pity the most evolved and interesting creature in the universe?

“You have them stuck in here against their will.”

“Roaches don’t have a will.”

“Everything has a will. Why else would they eat and breed? And seek out places that protect them from humans? They evolve because they have no other way to survive.”

“I thought you didn’t like them?” he smirked.

“I don’t. They carry disease.” She stood before the tubular glass that contained the largest species he owned.

“Not all of them do, in fact, roaches can survive a week without its head. They can be submerged underwater for over thirty minutes and not die. They are the Cyborgs of the bug species. There are, in fact, Cyborg roaches spying and crawling around Earth, each its own intelligent creation of mankind.

Kat turned toward his crouched form. “You can survive without a head?”

“Absolutely. If I upload myself into another tech source first.”

“And breathe underwater for that length of time?”

“Not me, personally, but other Cyborgs can survive weeks underwater,” Dommik answered as she walked out of his line of sight and was obscured by a hundred twitching bugs. Even amongst the obstruction of the critters and the curved glass, her emerald eyes glittered like beacons and her copper curls reflected off the clear surfaces.

She looked at him through the curved glass, her features disrupted, ugly, and appealing all at once. “So. You’re telling me that you’re more roach than human? And why? Expecting me to be disgusted by that?” Her lips turned down in thought. Kat looked at the bugs with glass-filtered beady eyes. “I don’t even know you. Why do you think I would care?”

But she wants to know me. You’re obvious, Katalina, you just don’t realize it. Dommik thought about that because in it’s grim way, he was doing the same thing, and he was being more obvious than her.

Her head popped out at the side. “Why do some of these have colors? Are bigger? I’ve never known a species of roach that had a blue antenna.” She looked away from him and back at the cases. “I’ve never seen roaches look like any of these before...except those,” she pointed to the last case in line. “Those look like the ones I’d see in my grandma’s garden.”

Dommik got up and walked over to her, pleased with himself and for her observation. Girls don’t like to know about bugs, but she knew enough to know that the ones before her were not entirely right.

There were six enclosures in total and he started with the one she stood in front of. The pretty ones. With the blue appendages. “It’s because these aren’t from Earth.” He indicted them. “I found this species on Elyria when out on a mission. I didn’t think much of it at the time but as I continued to hunt, I realized something.”

There was a pause before she asked.“What?”

“That I had seen something like it before. I was almost gored that day, fuck, it took over my processors until I captured my prey and sealed it on the ship. I went out to look for the bug. Three days of searching before I found it again. I brought it aboard to run a series of tests. Do you know what I found?”

“That it was a roach?”

“It shared enough DNA that, for the first time, I couldn’t logically find an answer. Within myself or within the network.”

“What if humans brought it to Elyria on accident and the environment changed it?”

“I thought of that but no, enough of it was different that it wouldn’t have been possible to evolve in such a way in such a short amount of time.”

“Radiation?” she asked him, her eyes trained on the bugs.

“Did you grow up on cartoons?” They glared at each other before he continued. “I found more and kept them to study and compare. It wasn’t until several years later on a mission to Taggert, to fight back the monsters that tried to break open the prison that I found these,” he indicated the second enclosure closest to the door in the room. A roach that was small and beige, light and sandy in its color, designed to blend into the wastes of that world. “I captured a handful and brought them aboard. They shared DNA with the roaches from Earth and Elyria.”

Kat cocked her head and studied the new roaches with interest. “That’s not possible,” she whispered after a time.

“Is it?”

She looked up at him and threaded the hair back from her face. Dommik’s internal mech ground against each other. The inhuman parts of him wanted to take over and unleash on the girl that gazed at him. No matter what he told himself, he knew he was no better than Gunner or any other man. It had nothing to do with his urges but more to do with his restraint which had never been tested as such since his youth.

The scientists in the cybernetics lab had tested him and every other Cyborg like him against their basic animal instincts. First food, then territory, shelter, space, and finally the need to breed.

They didn’t need any more rapists in the field during wartime. Not to mention, more than half of his doctors were women and knew better than to send super soldiers out into the field without knowing that aspect about them.

Their mothers made sure they knew how to behave like all mothers should. As far as Dommik knew, no Cyborg has ever forced him or herself on a victim. And he wasn’t about to be the first.

Kat looked away from him. “I don’t know. I didn’t study history, space law, or hard science.” She admitted. Her arms sunk back into the long sleeves.

“What did you study?”

“Nursing. It’s in my file. I studied hospice care,” she whispered, “to take care of the dying.”

“And you walked onto a ship that holds life and death in its hands.”

“It was that or tea.”

Dommik studied her, confused. He wasn’t prone to be curious about humans, but the twinge to ask her to explain herself was felt in his gut. He would have to meditate on it later...or consult his brethren.

She went on, “What about the others?” Changing the subject and walking to the next glass.

“Those are from Gliese.” The girl stiffened, furthering his curiosity. “I saw them when I was stationed there during the Great War. I only went back for them recently.”

“They also have the same DNA?”

“Yes.”

He could hear her heart speed up, elevate, pulsate and erratic. He watched her staring at the bugs. Her delicate hands lifted up to plaster themselves on the glass. The roaches twitched and scurried away.

“Truly. The same?” she asked again. The heat of her hands created a weave of condensation.

“Yes.”

So many emotions flashed across her eyes that he couldn’t pinpoint one. Her face was blank before it was sad until it turned to stone. The need to reach out and touch her was great but his metal muscles remained stiff at his sides. He saw his doom in her eyes.

Kat absorbed the roaches, her body was in profile now, and if he wanted to, he could reach out and touch her in less than three strides. He could have her in his arms in a second.

“How similar?” she asked. Her hands dropped and vanished back into the jacket’s sleeves.

Dommik shrugged, “As similar as the rest.”

“Have you encountered any other bugs on Gliese?” She continued to study the black roaches from that planet, a faraway look in her eyes. He looked at the critters that held her attention.

“Many.”

“Do you have them here? On the ship, like these?”

“No. I only study roaches.” He watched her watch the bugs. Her body heat fogged up the glass case. Eventually, her mouth puckered and she took a step back. “Why?”

Kat finally looked back at him, her face softened with worry.

Dommik stood up and stepped toward her. He asked again, “why?”

“My parents were doctors stationed on the orbiting medical center,” she trailed off, her fingers twitched at her sides. “They met there and went planetside in rotation and did fieldwork for the base and new colony efforts. When they conceived me, they returned to Earth so I wouldn’t be labeled as an ‘offworlder.’”

“And they brought bugs back with them?”

She took a deep breath. “You could say that.”

Dommik pressed a button on the panel next to them, directly under the glass enclosure of the Gliese roaches. The panel popped open to reveal a filter contraption and debris from the creatures above. He indicated a button off to the side. “Food. It’s now part of your job to feed them daily and clean out the waste.” Dommik walked to the door and it slid open soundlessly. “If you have any questions, ask one of the Bin’s.”

She called out after him, “What about the reports?”

He closed his eyes only to open them slowly. The EPED didn’t know about his hobbies and he would like to keep it that way. But he wouldn’t ask her to lie for him on his behalf. “It’s your choice.”

A soft sighed, “okay,” was his only answer.

Dommik turned back toward Kat, her body and her eyes far away again. “It’s not uncommon, you know, to accidently bring back things to Earth. Or to any other planet.” He wasn’t sure why he needed to say it but he felt the odd need to console her. “It can’t be helped. Mistakes happen.”

“I know,” she murmured, glancing his way.

“That’s where I come in, Katalina, I help prevent these mistakes, mitigate them, contain them. It’s why the Earthian Planetary Exploration Division exists. I might only be the one that captures the snake but those in the background use that snake to create the anti-venom.”

He left her at that.