Chapter One

Dalia VH570 stared at the bright, white light above her, watching it flicker as she felt her thoughts dissolve into the same nothingness as the whiteness that surrounded her. She had always hated physical examinations. She just wasn’t certain why.

The prick of something sharp jolted Dalia into sudden, crystal clear alertness and the absolute certainty of danger. Opening her eyes, she surveyed her surroundings, searching for the threat she sensed.

She was still in the examination room, but she was bound to the table now. Turning her head, she looked at the man who’d just stabbed a syringe into her arm.

Her movement brought his gaze to hers, and she saw his eyes dilate instantly with fear, guilt, and the certainty that he was looking into the face of death. His reaction forced a healthy shot of adrenaline through her body and her heart leapt into overtime, pumping it through her. Gritting her teeth, she concentrated, tensing every muscle and sinew in her body, and heaved upward, breaking the restraints. The technician was still staring at her stupidly when she gripped his hand. Snatching the syringe from her arm, she drove it into his carotid artery, depressing the plunger.

His eyes rolled back into his head. The saliva in his mouth boiled, foaming, spilling between his gasping lips. She sat up, grasping his throat, half lifting him from the floor. “You tried to kill me. Why?”

His mouth worked. He gagged, coughed up spittle and blood. “Help me,” he pleaded.

Dalia shook him. “First tell me why.”

“Gestating... you’re gestating. Never supposed to be able....”

She stared at him blankly, trying to understand the word, trying to figure out what it had to do with his attempt to kill her. “What is this word?”

“Reproduction. To bear young,” he gasped, clawing at her hand frantically.

She dropped him, staring down at him as he sprawled on the floor beside the gurney she sat on. Tossing the sterile sheet off that had covered her, she slipped to the floor. “A child? A baby? You tried to kill me because I’m ... breeding? It’s only a fifty thousand credit fine!”

He shook his head frantically. “Not human. Not human.”

She stared at him uncomprehendingly for several moments but finally lifted her head, realizing at last that the alert was sounding, had been since she’d broken her restraints. She blinked, calculating the time. Anywhere from three to five minutes had passed. The exits would be blocked by now and guarded. A contingent of guards would be racing toward this room.

She glanced down at the technician, but he’d stopped gurgling. His eyes were wide and staring now.

A wave of nausea washed over her. That should have been her. It would have been if she hadn’t awakened when he’d speared her with the needle. She’d never killed another human being before, though, and she couldn’t decide whether she was more horrified at having a hand in his death, revolted by what a human being looked like in their death throes, or because she’d been a hair’s breadth from experiencing rather than witnessing. She didn’t have time to analyze her distress, however. Shelving it for the moment, she glanced around the examination room, but no windows magically appeared. There was still only the one door.

She checked the walls, the floor, the ceiling.

Why had she allowed them to take her into a room with only one exit? Her training had taught her better. It was stupid to have relaxed her guard only because the med lab belonged to the company, the company she killed for.

She’d never trusted the damned company.

Leaping up onto the examination table, she reached up toward the ceiling and realized she was still too short. She could just touch the tiles above her with her fingertips. She went up on her tiptoes, bounced. Finally, she managed to dislodge the panel above her. It was a suspended ceiling, she saw, held aloft by thin wires. She seriously doubted it would hold her weight, but she was out of options.

Leaping up again, she caught the frame that had held the tile. As she’d more than half expected, it buckled, bringing down a rain of tiles around her.

The sound of running feet, many feet, came to her. It must be a full squad.

Good, she decided. The noise they were making would help to cover the noise she made. Leaping down from the examination table, she raced across the room, bent her knees and leapt upward, her arms extended. She crashed through the tile. It hit the floor around her. The wall, she saw went all the way up, approximately ten feet. Metal girders supported the floor above her.

It was the girders or nothing.

Whirling, she raced back toward the examination table, hit it flat footed and leapt upward, catching the bottom of a girder. With an effort, she pulled herself up, but she saw the space was too small for her to walk her way across hanging by her hands. Supporting most of her weight from her arms, she pulled her legs up and swung until she could hook her heels along the girder, as well.

It was dark above the ceiling, particularly since she had only just come from a room blindingly white, but she had excellent night vision. She focused her eyes and looked around. As far as she could see, there was nothing but girders, pipe, electrical wires and ductwork. The ductwork was too small to crawl through, and too light to support her weight.

She closed her eyes, mentally tracing her path through the building and into the examination room. Only a corridor separated her from the closest outer wall of the building, but the guards were racing down that path. She took the opposite direction. It was a good deal further from the outer wall, but it was also less likely that guards would be stationed there.

Moving swiftly now, she crawled, spider like beneath the beam until she’d reached the wall she’d seen on the other side. She turned then, following it until she found an opening. A catwalk ran through it and she dropped down onto it. Looking in first one direction and then the other, she finally decided to continue as she’d begun and crawled through the opening. She’d only just cleared it when she heard the guards pounding on the examination room door. Crouching low, she ran as fast as she could.

It wouldn’t take them long to figure out she was in the overhead ceiling and probably not much more than that to realize that the only way she could traverse it was along the catwalk.

She heard them behind her before she reached the outer wall.

Dropping to her stomach, she reached for the closest ceiling tile and lifted it up just enough to study the room beneath her.

It was occupied. A woman was lying on an examination table, just as Dalia had been only minutes before.

She didn’t have time to be picky.

Rolling off the catwalk, she dropped through the ceiling, landing in a half crouch on the floor. Startled, the woman sat up, opening her mouth to scream. Dalia leapt at her, covering the woman’s mouth with one hand and pinching the woman’s carotid artery with the other. The moment the woman’s eyes rolled back in her head, Dalia released her and looked around, absently checking the woman’s pulse to make certain she hadn’t killed her.

This room had both a window and a door. She moved to the window first, pulled the window covering aside and looked out. She was on the sixtieth floor, about half way up the building, more or less. The outside of the building was as smooth as glass. Windows broke the monotony every ten feet or so, but most likely every one of them was fixed just as this one was and could not be opened and was probably nearly as impossible to break.

She couldn’t fly, so that was out.

There was no point in trying to go down. They would be waiting for her. Up would only work if there were crafts on the roof.

It was a med lab. There were probably a half a dozen or more on the roof at any time.

There was one slight problem.

She didn’t have a stitch of clothing on and that was bound to draw attention. Shrugging, she helped herself to the tunic and trousers the woman had been wearing. They were too big, but it wouldn’t be nearly as noticeable as being naked. The woman’s shoes were too big, too. It was too risky to wear them, she decided. They would slow her down at the very least. At worst, the shoes could trip her if she needed to run. She slipped the stockings on to cover her bare feet and make them less noticeable, then moved to the door, opening it a crack.

No one seemed terribly excited. She saw a couple of techs strolling along one end of the corridor, notepads in hand. There was a knot of them at one end of the corridor, waiting, she realized, for an elevator or having just gotten off one.

Obviously, security still thought they had the ‘danger’ contained on the other side of the firewall that ran down the building.

Stepping from the room, she walked casually toward the row of elevators and punched the button that would summon one going up. As she stood waiting, several more people joined her, staring up at the display panel above the doors. Turning her head just enough she could examine each of them in her peripheral vision, she relaxed fractionally. There was no sign of security guards ... yet.

Impatience began to gnaw at her. She’d just decided to find the stairs and take them up several flights when the bells on three of the elevators dinged, announcing the arrival of the cubicles. Having already turned away and taken a step down the corridor toward the sign marked ‘exit’, she glanced inside the elevator she’d been standing in front of as the doors slowly began to open.

It was packed with guards ...and the one in front was holding a tracker. He glanced up as she strode away, his eyes locking on her for about two seconds. Shoving anyone aside who lay in her path, she broke into a run as she heard the guards launch themselves against the opening doors, trying to squeeze through all at once and succeeding only in bottlenecking the exit.

The doors on the fourth elevator had already begun to close as she reached it. She leapt through the rapidly narrowing opening. The timing was perfect. She’d barely landed inside when the doors slammed closed. Her last view of the corridor, however, had been of the guards charging the elevator.

They’d spotted her. They would reroute it, she knew.

Ignoring the gasps and protests of the four people already in the elevator when she’d jumped in, she moved to the control panel, studied it a moment and finally speared her fingers through the holes drilled for the buttons, grasped the panel firmly and pulled it out of the wall, exposing the circuits. Almost simultaneously, the elevator lights blinked and the cubicle ground to a halt.

They’d already tied in.

Glancing over the circuits, she saw immediately that there was no way to rewire it. She grasped the panel and wrenched it out, tossing it to one side and evoking a round of screams from the women in the group. Grasping the main feed, she pulled on the wire until she had enough to reach, then stripped the insulation from the end, felt behind her head until she found the jack and plugged directly into the computer.

It took thirty seconds to override their override, and another five to lock them out. As the elevator jolted into motion again, Dalia examined the database and found that there were four crafts on the roof, fueled and prepped to go. One of the elevators was already on the roof. The other two were on the ground level and the tenth floor.

She was about to log out when it occurred to her that now was her opportunity to discover what the computer knew about her situation. The CPU inside her brain began displaying images before her eyes almost instantly.

Gestation was an archaic form of reproduction that had been practiced by the human race until the last century. The fertilized ovum attached itself inside the female’s body, within a cavity known as the womb, and lived off of the female’s body until it reached a state of maturity that would allow it to survive on its own.

Dalia frowned. How is the parasite introduced into the host to begin with?

Male and female each carried an element, the female an egg or ovum, which contained the DNA of the female host. The male donor provided sperm, which contained the male’s DNA and would activate the egg and set off a chain reaction. The male would deliver his DNA via sexual intercourse.

Dalia mulled that over for a moment. She hadn’t engaged in sex, at all. It was prohibited by the company to anyone in her position, an infraction punishable by termination. She’d always assumed they meant termination of employment, however. In the event that the female did not have sexual intercourse with a male, was there another method of delivery? Or was it possible for the female to manipulate the ovum herself and induce it to begin to replicate cells?

This method of reproduction was imprecise. Often the female would become impregnated when reproduction was infeasible or undesirable due to economic, health or social conditions. Occasionally, the male or female who wished to reproduce would be found to be infertile. If the male was infertile, and unable to provide his DNA, a donor would be found who was a desirable substitute and his DNA would be introduced into the female via medical procedure.

It still didn’t make any sense to her. They’d impregnated her and now had decided to terminate both her and the pregnancy? She shook it off. She didn’t have time to study it now. Status?

Passing the 100th floor.

Locate the guards for me.

Ten in elevator number one, passing the 15th floor. Five in elevator number three, passing the 40th floor. Five on elevator number two, egressing onto the roof now. Thirty on the ground floor level.

Chapter Two

Dalia removed the jack and turned to study the other passengers. They were huddled into one corner, staring at her as if she was some sort of monster. She supposed she could see their point, but it irritated the hell out of her anyway.

She had maybe five minutes before they reached the roof. That meant they had five minutes to deploy and be waiting for her. She could stop the elevator and take the stairs, but she wasn’t certain that would give her any advantage. Even though she’d locked them out of the computer system, they would probably be expecting the possibility and have that exit covered, too.

There was no cover for them on the roof beyond the craft moored there, but then they must know she was unarmed. There wasn’t any reason for them to take cover except as a precaution in case she’d somehow located a weapon.

She finally decided they would probably assume assault positions anyway. The only thing you could count on about militia was that they always went by the book, and they always followed orders. Obviously, they didn’t want or need to take her alive. They wanted her dead. That meant they would be stationed and ready to catch her in a crossfire.

She glanced at the other passengers speculatively, but she knew they were as expendable as she was. The objective wasn’t to slaughter them, but the security guards weren’t likely to quibble about having to go through them to get her, so using them as a shield was out.

Besides, she didn’t want to be responsible for their deaths.

“They’re waiting for me on the roof. If you don’t want to die today, lie down on the floor as flat as you can and clasp your hands on top of your heads. With any luck, the fire will miss you.” They gaped at her uncomprehendingly for several moments, then scrambled to comply, fighting briefly over who would have the position closest to the door. As she felt the elevator decelerating, Dalia jumped up onto the handrail that ran around the cubicle, bracing her hands above her head to balance herself.

The moment the door began to open, laser fire pelted the interior of the cubicle, covering almost every square inch of the walls from about one foot up to the ceiling. The side of the elevator protected Dalia as she’d hoped it would. She held her breath, waiting until she heard some call a cease fire, allowing the seconds to tick off as she envisioned them slowly stepping from their cover, advancing far enough to look into the elevator to see if they’d gotten her.

The bodies on the floor would confuse them, hopefully, for critical moments.

The trick was to time it precisely, move before they realized she wasn’t one of the bodies lying on the floor of the elevator.

She held her breath, focusing on listening and interpreting the sounds she heard since she couldn’t see; cautious, carefully placed footsteps--three pair. Two were still under cover.

Abruptly, she swung into action, landing on the floor of the elevator and bursting through the doors as they began to close once more. As she’d hoped, she caught them completely off guard. The three closest to the elevator opened their eyes and mouths wide in surprise. She hit the first one full tilt, bowling him over. She clothes lined the second with an extended arm, grabbing his weapon from his slackened grip even as he executed a flip. The third man, she took out with the butt of the weapon she’d grabbed. She whirled in a circle then, laying out random fire and catching the remaining two guards even as they finally managed to begin firing on her.

Within moments, five dead or groaning men lay on the flight deck. Gasping for breath, she surveyed them, her hands on her hips. “Never send a man to do a cyborg’s job,” she muttered in satisfaction, but then mentally shrugged. She was a rogue hunter, trained and bio-technologically enhanced to bring down rogue cyborgs, and she would’ve still had her hands full if they had sent even two. It was fortunate for her that they’d made an error in judgment and sent men instead.

She frowned. They either hadn’t anticipated having any problem terminating her--which seemed unlikely given her training, or the decision to terminate her was of short standing.

Shaking off her questions and the weariness and apathy in the aftermath of battle, Dalia moved over them, quickly collecting their weapons and then headed for the nearest craft. Tossing the weapons into the patient bay of the ambulance craft, she scrambled into the cockpit, examined the layout to identify the craft and began flipping switches to activate the engines. Even as the craft began to lift off, the doors of one of the other elevators opened and men began to pour out, firing at her.

She punched the craft into hyper acceleration and it shot upwards and away in a sharp slingshot like motion--not, unfortunately, before it caught a dozen hits. The craft almost immediately became unstable and she knew they’d managed to hit something critical. Struggling to keep it level, she allowed it to drop toward the upper level traffic airway forty floors below her.

Bright dots lit up her radar screen both above and below her, looking like a swarm of insects. She glanced up through the viewing bubble and counted two crafts descending fast. They were ambulances like the one she’d taken, and the craft itself had no firepower. As long as she didn’t let them get close enough to catch her in the sights of their handheld weapons, the risk of taking another hit was slim.

She wasn’t certain if the craft needed another hit to bring it down, however. It began bucking and jolting as she hit the airway. The computer failed to adjust to oncoming traffic and she slammed into the protective force field of another craft, bounced off of it and ping ponged against three more before she dropped beneath the airway in a forward gliding descent.

In truth, it wasn’t much of a glide. The craft continued to bounce and drop erratically in a controlled crash, as if it were striking solid objects instead of air currents. She managed to drop through the mid-level airway without incident, mostly because the heavy traffic was on the third level she’d already passed. A layer of greenish-yellow smog lay below her, obscuring her view of the lower airway. She landed on the roof of a passing craft when she reached the lowest level, was repelled by the protective field that surrounded it and nose dived through the airway, free falling for some twenty feet before she managed to kick the ambulance craft in the ass and get it going again.

Androids, cyborgs and pedestrians thronged the walks below her. When they looked up and saw her craft falling toward them, they scattered like fall leaves caught in a strong cross wind--in every direction. Despite that, she managed to set the craft down on the walk without smearing anyone. Its forward momentum responded sluggishly to her attempts to brake, however, and the craft slid along the walk for nearly a hundred yards before coming to rest against the base of one of the buildings that surrounded the walks like mountains, blocking so much of the light that the ground level lay in perpetual night except for artificial lighting.

The moment the craft finally stopped, Dalia threw off her restraints and struggled to stand. As far as she could tell she had suffered no more than bruises and a few minor cuts, but she knew adrenaline was pushing her now. She could be hurt much worse and not know it right away.

Regardless, she had to put as much distance between herself and the craft as possible before the guards caught up with her. Sorting through the weapons, she grabbed the two that had the fullest charges, slung one on each shoulder and scrambled out of the craft. Gawkers had already begun to converge on the downed craft when she emerged. Ignoring them, she strode purposefully toward the group milling about and pushed through. They parted before her, as if they feared she might be contaminated with something.

When she’d cleared the crowd, she broke into a jog and finally a run, glancing to her left and right each time she passed a narrow alley in search of one that was unoccupied. She’d begun to despair that there was even so much as a square inch of ground level space not inhabited when she raced past a vacant throughway. Stopping abruptly, she reversed directions and raced down it till she came to the first intersection. She began to weave her way back and forth through the narrow alleys until she came at last to the slum area of the city.

It, too, was occupied, but by the denizens of the dark--the ‘subhuman’ culture the upstanding citizens of the city were prone to consider did not exist. Unless the company was offering a reward for her, it was unlikely anyone would be interested enough in her to give the guards searching for her any tips.

Of course, they wouldn’t need any information if she couldn’t get rid of the locator surgically implanted in her hip, but she couldn’t get rid of it until she could shake her pursuit long enough to stop.

Added to that little problem was the fact that she’d had to leave without her uniform--which held a med kit.

Tired now, she slowed to a brisk walk, stopping each time she found a derelict sprawled drunkenly on the walk and checking him for a knife. She found a razor on the second man she checked and studied it doubtfully. It was rusted, and she wasn’t certain it could cut deeply enough, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.

Straightening, she looked around for a lighted area and moved toward it. She didn’t like the idea of standing in the light, but she didn’t want to butcher her hip either. She needed the light to see what she was doing. After scanning the immediate area for threat and deciding it was minimal, she set her weapons down, shucked the trousers and probed the flesh of her hip until she found the locator.

Without giving herself time to think it over, she sliced the flesh as deeply as the razor would cut. Seconds passed before the pain caught up with her brain. She’d already dug her fingers into the cut, grasped the locator and yanked it free of the bone before fire poured through her. Gasping at the wave of dizziness that washed over her, she dropped the locator to the pavement, picked up one of the weapons and smashed it with the butt.

Blood was gushing from the cut. She studied it for several moments, but she knew there were no major veins in that area. Regardless, she couldn’t allow it to continue to bleed. They’d be able to follow the blood trail almost as easily as the locator. Then, too, she might run out of fluids before she managed to get hold of a medical kit.

She didn’t like it, but she didn’t have any options. Lifting the weapon, she set it on its lowest setting and carefully sited it along the cut, firing off one quick burst.

The pain didn’t take nearly as much time to reach her brain that time. She staggered back and fell to her knees, fighting the blackness that threatened to overwhelm her.

Dimly, she saw she’d attracted some attention from the local lowlifes. Lifting the weapon with an effort, she fired off several warning shots. When they scattered, she grabbed her trousers and the other weapon and began moving again. She wanted nothing so much as to crash somewhere, if only for fifteen or twenty minutes, but she couldn’t afford the luxury until she’d put a lot of distance between herself and the locator she’d just destroyed. Her pursuit would almost certainly have triangulated on that position by now.

The faintness didn’t recede. She had to fight it every step of the way. Finally, she managed to put at least a mile between her and the locator, before she reached a point where she knew she couldn’t go another step without falling on her face.

Pausing, she leaned back against the wall of a building and searched the area. She hadn’t seen anyone in a while, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there, watching, waiting for her to let her guard down so that they could steal anything she had of value and probably kill her in the process.

The building she was leaning against was ancient, deserted, crumbling. She climbed through the nearest opening and studied it, moving slowly through, her weapon at the ready. Skittering noises filtered to her from time to time, but she thought it must be some sort of animals. They didn’t make enough noise to be human.

She came upon a partial stair leading upward and debated briefly whether it would be better to find a hiding place on one of the other floors or on the ground floor. Finally, she decided to try the second floor. It would give her a little lead time if she heard anyone coming. She could, if she had to, jump from the second floor without doing too much damage to herself ... as long as she was careful to land correctly.

Shouldering her weapon, she placed her back against the wall and moved carefully from step to step until she reached a gap. Checking the strength of the handrail to see if it would support her if the stair collapsed, she leapt the distance, coming down on her wounded hip. Her knee buckled, but she managed to catch herself with the railing.

When she’d reached the top, she turned to study the stairs and finally pulled one of the weapons from her shoulder and cut a larger section out. It would be far easier, she knew, for her to leap the hole downward than for anyone to leap it coming up. She found another set of stairs near the rear of the building, or rather a stairwell. Those stairs were completely gone.

The place reeked of death. As tempted as she was to just find a corner and collapse, she knew she couldn’t rest until she’d assured herself she had the place to herself. The building had looked like it had at least six floors, even as ancient as it was, but there were only two floors accessible from the floor she was on. The upper floors had begun to slowly collapse down upon each other.

She found a badly decomposed body two floors up, which explained the god-awful smell and the lack of other occupants.

Relieved, she made her way down again, found a comfortable corner that was relatively free of debris, and collapsed. She’d hardly even settled when blackness closed in around her. She was disoriented for several moments when she woke. Sluggishly, her mind kicked in and memory flooded back to her. She had no idea how long she’d slept--there wasn’t enough sunlight filtering so far beneath the city to judge from the sun’s movement. She could’ve been out mere minutes, or hours, or even days--but she struggled to her feet and checked her perimeter.

Satisfied that they hadn’t discovered her and surrounded the building while she rested, she found a corner to relieve herself and then returned to her corner and sat down to figure out what options she might have.

There weren’t a lot. She didn’t know why they wanted her dead, but they seemed pretty damned set on seeing it done.

The tech had seemed to indicate that it was because she was gestating, but that was nearly as inconceivable as the fact that she was gestating at all. No one bore young anymore. It was too unpredictable and too inconvenient. If they happened to want one, they bought a permit and ordered one from the med lab. They hadn’t practiced the ‘natural’ way of doing it in nearly a century. As far as she knew, though, there was no law against it, certainly not a death sentence, anyway.

She wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d arrested her for breeding without a permit. She would’ve expected something like that, if she’d been engaging in sexual activity and stupid enough to do it without protection. But that would’ve been followed by a brief trial, maybe, and then release as soon as she coughed up the fine and bought a permit.

Maybe it was a law that was still on the books but hadn’t been used in so long that nobody, except the lawmakers and the law enforcers, even knew it was there anymore?

It seemed possible. The morons never got rid of laws. They just made more when the need arose. There were laws still on the books, she knew, from centuries before, laws that people didn’t even understand anymore because nothing they pertained to even existed now.

Briefly, she wondered if there was any way to remove the parasite, but it occurred to her fairly quickly that that wasn’t going to help. If there’d been a way, or if that would’ve made a difference, they would have done that instead of deciding to kill her. She hadn’t come cheap. The company had spent a lot of money training her to be a rogue hunter, and even more bioengineering her for strength, stamina, high pain tolerance, computer assisted mental capabilities, and a broader hearing and sight range.

Anyway, she felt strangely possessive about it. She didn’t know why, and she didn’t really want to examine it at the moment. But she did know she didn’t want to make any kind of decision about, possibly, removing it until she’d had time to think it through and consider every possibility.

Besides, the tech had been dying. How much faith could she place in anything he’d told her? The company’s reasons for trying to terminate her could be something else entirely.

Unfortunately, no amount of carefully reconstructing her actions over the past month, or the month before that, produced any possibilities. She hadn’t failed her last mission and, even if she had, punishment for failure was only a death sentence if the rogue dealt it out. The company was content to fine her all her pay and half her previous paycheck.

Shaking her head, Dalia finally decided she couldn’t waste time trying to figure it out. It was enough to know she was dead if ... when they caught her. The only chance that she could see of turning the ‘when’ to ‘if’ was if she managed to get off world. Sooner or later, if she stayed, they were going to catch her, with or without the locator.

She could die a slow death here without food or water, or risk getting caught going for supplies. One retina scan and she was done for. Besides, she wouldn’t be able to buy anything without having her barcode scanned, even in the black market, and once they had that, they’d have a bead on her location.

They would be expecting her to try to get off planet, though.

Her only chance, as far as she could see, was to locate a smuggler and either take the ship, or bargain a ride, and that meant she was going to have to figure out a way out of the dome.

Chapter Three

It took her almost a week to locate a man who claimed he not only knew a way out of the dome undetected, but also knew where the smugglers usually landed. It stood to reason that he would since there wouldn’t be any other reason for leaving the protection of the dome.

The problem was Dalia had nothing to bargain with. She finally convinced him to take her, however, by telling him if he did she wouldn’t blow his head off. He wasn’t terribly thrilled with the bargain, but he led her through the tunnels that eventually carried them beyond the city without detection.

By that time she had no problem blending with the natives. She’d had very little to eat, very little sleep, no access to bathing facilities and, since the clothes she was standing in were all she had, she looked as ragged and unkempt as everyone else. She didn’t like it, but she was inclined to see it as an advantage.

The quality of the air inside the dome wasn’t that great in the lower regions, but the air beyond the dome was the next thing to unbreathable. She still had her weapons, but the lack of a mask put her at a distinct disadvantage when the smugglers had more manpower and firepower at their disposal than she did.

The moment they reached the landing area, she saw immediately that simply blending wasn’t going to be enough. There was no way she was going to get close enough to either overpower the smugglers and steal a ship, or slip on board. Releasing her ‘guide’, she watched until she was certain he was headed back the way they’d come and wouldn’t alert the smugglers, and then settled down to study them and watch for an opportunity.

She’d been fully aware that smuggling was rife, but she hadn’t realized that trafficking in stolen and/or illegal merchandise was done on quite as grand a scale as this. When she arrived, a large ship was already at the rendezvous point. More than a dozen smugglers had piled off of it. A third was busy unloading, a third loading new merchandise and the rest pacing restlessly about the activities with some fairly intimidating firepower.

Before they had even completed their business, a second craft nearly as large set down at a little distance and proceeded pretty much as the first had, off loading on one side and on loading on the other.

With decent air, or a mask, she might have been able to take four or five men. She wasn’t stupid enough, or desperate enough to consider taking on crews as large as this, particularly when she was fairly certain that it would take no more than a hint of threat for them to combine forces.

She had very little food, however, and not a great deal of time. After a little while, she decided to change positions and see if another position would provide her with a better opportunity.

To her surprise, it did, but it had nothing to do with either of the two large ships she’d been watching. As she made her way around the perimeter, a relatively small, very sleek, racer settled into the rubble-strewn field at a little distance from the other two ships.

This might be doable.

The craft was designed for short, very fast hops, from planet to planet--and required no more than a pilot as crew or perhaps a pilot and copilot. There was no way it was being employed to haul cargo. It was too small to carry much and too short-range to go far--unless the pilot was insane enough to use the wormholes--which, upon reflection, she supposed he must.

If the pilot was smuggling anything, it was human cargo--escaped slaves or criminals fleeing justice--or possibly rogue cyborgs. He would want privacy to load his cargo. The fact that he’d landed so far from the other two ships seemed to bear up her theory.

She settled down to wait. It wasn’t until the first of the two larger ships had lifted off that the gangplank was finally let down. Minutes passed. Finally, a man appeared at the top of the gangplank, stood looking out for several moments, and finally sauntered almost casually down the gangplank and stepped off of it.

The only weapons he had on him were strapped to his waist, a pistol holstered on one side and a three-foot blade on the other.

She stared at the blade. It indicated a strong familiarity with some primitive culture somewhere in the universe, but she couldn’t see it well enough from this distance to place it. Not that it mattered. In the first place, she didn’t particularly care where she went so long as she could elude the company for long enough to figure out what was going on and how it had come about that she’d suddenly become high on their list of public enemies. In the second, it supported the theory of rogues.

In general, cyborgs were at least half human, or half biological materials anyway, and all of that on the exterior, but anyone familiar with cyborgs could spot them within minutes. They were just ... not quite human, regardless of their appearance. It was often hard to put your finger on just what it was, but there was always something that gave them away, even to people not particularly looking or not particularly interested. The only way they could truly disappear was to find a culture too primitive to know what a cyborg was.

The question was, was he doing it for the money? For the adventure? Or because he was one of those fanatical assholes always trying to change the universe?

The latter made her want to puke. She despised fanatics, whatever their particular brand of insanity was, because they were not only incredibly boring and annoying, but they were also dangerous. They, almost inevitably, managed to convince huge numbers of ‘followers’ to believe them and usually managed to get them killed.

At this particular moment, however, it could prove useful.

Money was a problem. She had plenty of credits saved up, but she wasn’t certain it was enough to tempt a smuggler of this caliber. If it wasn’t, and he scanned her barcode for the money, she would be located in short order.

Finally, she decided to move a little closer and get a better look at him.

She managed to get several yards closer before she ran out of cover. She discovered it didn’t particularly help her, however. Naturally enough, it was dark. Smugglers didn’t land in the daylight, and it was smoggy as be damned, as well. The poor visibility wasn’t as much a problem, however, as the fact that her feminine side took that inopportune moment to kick in and completely distracted her.

He was, quite possibly, the finest specimen of a male she’d ever set eyes on. Even her male counterparts weren’t generally so beautifully enhanced. Her first good look at him impacted on her as physically as if she’d been hit by a grenade concussion. She felt as if she’d been body slammed, too stunned to think for several moments. Finally, her training kicked in and she settled behind the pile of rubble and frowned, wondering what had just happened.

Not only was she certain she’d never had a reaction like that to a male before, she couldn’t even remember experiencing anything even close. Her training had been thorough and nothing had been left to chance, certainly not something as predictable and inevitable as sexual attraction. Very little ever managed to break through her conditioning as a soldier and throw her off kilter. Some sort of chemical imbalance related to the gestation, she wondered?

The sounds of the second craft lifting off jogged her from her abstraction and into action.

She peered at the pilot, saw that he’d been distracted, as well, and began to move quickly around the ship while he stood watching the ship’s ascent. Coming upon him from behind, she placed the barrel of her weapon against the center of his back, directly over his heart. “I need passage off of this rock, and I don’t particularly care who I have to kill to get it. Take me, and I’ll pay you for your trouble and you can get on with your life. Give me any trouble and I’ll kill you.”

The moment the barrel of her weapon dug into his back, he went perfectly still. As she finished her little speech, however, he moved, so fast her jaw didn’t have time to drop in surprise, snatching her weapon from her hands so hard and fast she was surprised he didn’t take her fingers with it.

“I only take rogues,” he said coolly, taking the weapon in both hands and bending it into a bow, as if it had been made of putty instead of titanium alloy.

Dalia glanced from the bent weapon into the face that had launched a million flyers. It was Reuel CO469, the first of his kind, the first cyborg rogue, the leader of all who’d come after him, and the only rogue nobody had even come close to catching in all the time she’d worked for the company.

“Oh fuck!”

A smile curled that devastating mouth. Stepping toward her, he grasped her arms, thrusting them behind her back and bringing her up hard against his massive chest. “We could. On the other hand I am waiting for someone and I really do not like being interrupted when I am pleasuring a beautiful woman.”

“That wasn’t an invitation,” Dalia snapped.

His dark brows rose. “No?” He shook his head and finally shrugged. “Machines! They can never quite grasp the subtleties of human interaction, can they? That is what always gives us away.”

She didn’t believe for one moment that he’d interpreted her comment literally. He was, she realized with a touch of stunned amazement, amusing himself. “Let go of me,” she said through gritted teeth.

His smile vanished. “I am not even slightly tempted ... rogue hunter.”

For the first time in her memory, Dalia felt real, unmitigated fear. “I wouldn’t be fleeing the city if I were.”

“The question is, are you fleeing the city? Or was this merely a clever ruse?”

She gave him a look. “I had my weapon on your back. I could’ve killed you then and there would’ve been no point in subterfuge.”

“Except that that would not have gotten you into the rebel camp, would it, Dalia?”

Dalia stared at him in dismay. She licked suddenly dry lips. “My name’s Kaya.”

“Your name is Dalia VH570 ... and you are a rogue hunter ... gone rogue.”

Of all the things he might have said, nothing could have stunned her more, or more surely inspired her to throw caution to the wind. “I’m no rogue,” she spat in disgust before she thought better of it. “I’m human.”

His mouth tightened until his lips were no more than a thin line. His nostrils flared as he dragged in a deep breath to calm his temper. “You have enough contempt to be a rogue hunter, whatever you want to call yourself.”

Dalia twisted, testing his hold of her, but she was not the least surprised when he held her without any sign of difficulty. She supposed she should have simply accepted the fact that she was dead except for the dying part. He knew she was a rogue hunter. He wasn’t going to simply let her go, and he wasn’t going to take her with him.

Somehow, though, she found she simply could not give up or accept that she wasn’t going to be able to find a way out of this. “If you know about me, then you know I’m on the run. I’m no threat to you.”

“Not presently. But, then, you are assuming I believe any propaganda the company chooses to put out. I do not.” He leaned close, placing his mouth near her ear. “They lie,” he whispered.

Her body obviously didn’t know or care that he was a cyborg. The heat of his breath on her ear and his scent in her nostrils combined, sending a rush of heat and weakness through her that couldn’t be interpreted as anything but desire.

An unaccustomed spurt of panic followed that confusing reaction. Dalia struggled to free her hands again. She was too much shorter than him, and too close, for a head butt to have any effect on him. More likely, she’d end up knocking herself out. Finding after only a few moments that she was having no appreciable effect, she desisted again, panting with effort. “What are you going to do with me?”

His arms tightened. Slowly, he lowered his head until his mouth was near her ear again. “Do not allow your prejudice to mislead you, little flower. I am not a machine. This flesh feels. This body desires. This mind wants. So, unless you want to discover what it is like to spread your legs for a cyborg, I would advise you to stop rubbing your very tantalizing little body against mine. I might decide to fuck you until no human man will ever do for you again.”

Two completely polar sensations went through Dalia at once; outrage that he would even consider treating her--a trained warrior and rogue hunter--as if she was nothing more than a pleasure slave, and pretty much the same jolt of stunned attraction that had hit her the moment she saw him--except that this time it was accompanied by a rush of heat and a deluge of adrenaline.

She went perfectly still, more from shocked surprise than because he had commanded it, or because she feared he might keep his word, hardly daring even to breathe. As she stared up at him, however, it occurred to her that he had offered her a bargaining chip she hadn’t even realized she possessed. “I would....” She licked her dried lips and tried again. “I will barter the use of my body for transport.”

He frowned. “I would sooner leave you here. I am sure it will surprise you, but I have no taste for killing ... and not much for humans, even to slake my needs.”

Dalia felt blood flood her cheeks, only to wash away so rapidly she felt slightly dizzy. “But ... you said....”

“I lied.”

She blinked at him, stunned once more, not because he admitted it, or even because he had the ability, but because he’d done it so convincingly that she’d believed him. It was no wonder the company had ceased production of this particular cyborg. It was no wonder he had never been caught. He was as human as any human spawned, but capable of far more than any human being, whether enhanced or not, and therefore far more dangerous.

“If you leave me here, you leave me to die,” she said finally, trying to keep the desperation from her voice.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Assuming you are not lying and the company is hunting you, but not because you have gone rogue, then why?”

“I don’t know.”

He eyed her skeptically.

“I don’t! I went in for my physical examination. When I woke, the tech was stabbing me with a needle.”

He studied her for several moments and finally, slowly, released her. “You did not question him?”

Dalia shrugged. “I snatched the needle out of my arm and drove it into his throat. It wasn’t pretty, but it was fast. I didn’t manage to get much out of him ... except....”

“Except?”

She shook her head. “Nothing that made any sense.” She studied him for several moments and finally tried again. “Look, I know you’ve no reason to trust me, but it’s only a matter of time before they catch up to me. I got rid of the locator--that’s the only thing that’s given me any time, but it won’t last. Take me anywhere. As long as there’s breathable air and half a chance for survival, I don’t care. I’ll give you everything I’ve got,” she said, shoving the sleeve of her tunic up and extending her arm to show him her barcode.

He studied it, surprise flickering briefly across his features. He was frowning thoughtfully as he looked at her again. “You are coded.”

“Everybody is coded at birth.”

“Except cyborgs.”

She studied him. “Cyborgs aren’t born. They’re created ... in a lab.”

“Humans are created in labs,” he countered, his lips tightening.

She thought about what the tech had told her and what she’d learned from the computer. “But not necessarily, and there’s the difference. They have the ability to create life inside their own bodies. The tech ... before he died, he said that I was gestating. I have ... life, here,” she finished, laying a hand over her lower belly.

He stared down at her hand for many moments before he looked up at her again. She had the sense that it was because he was so jolted by the admission that it took him far longer to assimilate the information than one would have expected. Shock was the human inability to accept what they had seen or heard, not something that should ever trouble a cyborg, a creation more machine than biological entity, regardless of their appearance or their artificial intelligence.

And still she had the feeling that he’d been as shocked as she had been at the news. He glanced away from her, turning his head to study something outside her range of vision. “They are coming.”

Catching her arm just above the elbow, he led her up the gangplank and into the ship. They traversed a narrow corridor and finally arrived at the captain’s cabin, which lay at the prow and encompassed the entire width of the ship. Pushing her inside, he studied her for several moments in silence. “You will stay here.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The following is an extended excerpt from Kaitlyn O’Connor’s Cyborg Series.  Sample, pick your favorite ‘flavor’—they’ll stand alone—or buy all seven!

 

 

 

Cyberevolution IV:

CYBORG

 

BY

 

KAITLYN O’CONNOR

 

 

( c) copyright February 2005 by Kaitlyn O’Connor

Cover Art by Jenny Dixon, ( c) copyright 2012

New Concepts Publishing

Lake Park, GA 31636

www.newconceptspublishing.com

 

 

 

This is a work of fiction.  All characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and not to be confused with fact.  Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.

Chapter One

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this mission,” Johnson VH571 muttered to no one in particular as the ship began to buck upon entering the atmosphere of the planet below them.

Amaryllis VH600’s gut clenched reflexively at the comment.  She’d been having bad vibes from the moment she and her partner had joined the mission in progress at the TM20 way station.  The company had indicated that the assignment would be a ‘piece of cake’, but they had a way of understating most of the operations they sent their hunters out on. 

This one stank of disaster waiting to happen and she doubted that she and Johnson were the only ones to think so. 

To be completely fair, though, there were a number of factors that could account for the sense of impending doom that had nothing to do with precognition or even logical assumptions based on previous operations.

She was a seasoned soldier.  She’d been on almost a dozen missions, most of them complete successes, but she still had pre-battle jitters every time she participated in a new operation, and this one promised to be something major, unlike any undertaking she’d taken part in before.  That was enough to make her uneasy in and of itself.

Beyond that, the story Robotics, Inc. had cooked up reeked of fabrication, and not just because their main objective was to capture one of their own--if possible--and eliminate her if necessary. 

Dalia VH570 was one of their best cyborg hunters.  It not only didn’t make sense that she’d gone rogue and joined ‘the enemy’--why would a human join forces with machines?--but, assuming the company wasn’t lying and she had, why the order to capture her if possible?  What made her more important than the rogues themselves, important enough to put together three squads of hunters in such a haphazard, poorly planned mission? 

Because misery was almost certainly one of the reasons everyone, including her, was so antsy.  Discomfort went with the territory.  As a soldier, she’d endured her share of it, but she wasn’t accustomed to being packed into a vessel designed for eight with sixteen other hunters like a food cube in a package of vacuum sealed rations. 

According to Robotics, Inc., the break in security had been unanticipated, which explained to an extent why they hadn’t had a lot of time for preparations.  The cyborgs, who’d either captured Dalia, or snatched her from beneath the company’s nose, were traveling in a short range racer and she supposed it only made sense to launch a chase in similar crafts, built for speed rather than distance and capacity.

Contrary to all logic, however, the cyborgs had gone deep space and they’d had, perforce, to follow or risk losing sight of the quarry all together. 

The end result had been three days of very little food, water, or sleep and she, for one, was cranky with the lack of all three.  With so many of them packed into one small craft, they’d had to rotate use of the two small cabins the ship boasted--which meant she’d had a grand total of twelve hours rest in the last seventy two hours--and almost nothing to eat or drink since they had no idea of how long the rations would have to last.

There was yet another reason for the sense of impending disaster that had nothing to do with the mission, and he was sitting right beside her, but, as always, Amaryllis did her best not to think about her partner, Reese, if she could help it.  As long as she didn’t think about why he could spell disaster for her, she figured she had a better chance of not falling in with the fantasies that could ruin her career and quite possibly lead to a good bit of jail time if the bastards that ran Robotics, Inc. were vindictive enough to pursue it.

She had a feeling they were.

Dismissing those thoughts with an effort, Amaryllis focused on the puzzle of their mission.   

The army Robotics, Inc. had built, the hunters, had been tracking and ‘decommissioning’ rogue cyborgs for years now.  As far as she knew, though, there’d never been a concerted assault like the one they currently faced … which bore the earmarks of an all out war.  In general, cyborgs traveled alone, occasionally in pairs.  That was the reason she and the other hunters usually worked alone or were sometimes partnered with one or two other hunters, depending on the circumstances--there were a lot of rogues to eliminate and the entire confederation of systems to hide in and she’d spent far more time hunting than battling.

What were the odds, she wondered, that a whole nest of them was about to fall right in their laps? 

She didn’t buy it, whatever the company said.  The cyborgs might be emotionally unstable due to faulty programming, but there was nothing wrong with their logic circuits.  They rarely made mistakes, and certainly not of this magnitude.

Robotics, Inc., on the other hand, had a bad habit of making stupid mistakes.

Building the cyborgs in the first place was the most notable one.  They just couldn’t resist playing God.  They’d cornered the market with their advances in robotics and robotically enhanced bio-genetic organs, but that only seemed to have whetted their appetite for more glory.  The rogues were the first--ever--marriage of robotics and bio-engineering to produce human-like cybernetic organisms--for what true purpose one could only imagine--but they’d succeeded beyond their wildest dreams and failed abysmally at the same time because, like the monster in the classic horror tale, their creation had turned on them.  The cyborgs had been so real, so ‘life like’ that, according to Robotics, Inc., they’d begun to believe it themselves.  Unfortunately, that belief had clashed with their programming and made them dangerously unstable.   

The hunter unit, of which she was a member, had been formed after their rebellion and escape to track these dangerous rogue cyborgs down and destroy them.

Why, and for that matter, how, after all this time, had the cyborgs decided to unite and oppose Robotics, Inc. in force when they’d been behaving up until now as one might expect, erratically and irrationally?

And why would Dalia, one of their own, one of their best, have ‘turned’? 

That part didn’t make any sense at all.  A few of the hunters seemed just a tad overzealous to her, a little on the fanatical side when it came to the cyborgs.  For her part, she couldn’t say that she despised them--they were machines, after all--and she thought she was probably typical of most hunters--doing her job, not actually sympathetic to the cyborgs but not particularly rabid either.  Sympathy was the key word though, and she didn’t see how one of their own could go from hunter to rogue sympathizer at the drop of a hat, particularly not Dalia, who supposedly had.

Even if she accepted that, which she didn’t, why would the cyborgs consider Dalia important enough to take such a risk as to land right in Robotics, Inc.’s backyard to pick her up?  Then, having done something so uncharacteristically stupid, they’d so far forgotten themselves as to be completely unaware of being followed?  Leading them back to their stronghold?

The flip side was the possibility that Dalia had been captured by the cyborgs, but that supposition took her nowhere either since she couldn’t come up with a ‘why and how’ that made any sense.

She considered herself a good soldier, but she didn’t like flying blindly into a situation that she didn’t understand.

The bucking of the ship finally subsided as they entered the atmosphere and Amaryllis glanced at the soldier beside her, wondering what Reese thought about the situation.  Typically, he appeared completely unruffled either by the impending battle or the teeth rattling jolting they’d just been through.

Irritation flitted through her.

It was all very well to be cool under fire, but Reese was just a little too unflappable to suit her.  For her part, she’d have felt better about working with him if she’d seen a hint of uneasiness in his cold blue eyes occasionally, a touch of doubt--maybe a little lust when he gave her one of those thorough once-overs he was prone to when he thought she wouldn’t notice--anything that indicated he wasn’t the next thing to a frigging cyborg himself. 

Not that she could honestly say she knew him all that well.  He wasn’t exactly the open, friendly, or chatty type and aside from their current mission, she’d only been partnered with him on two others.  Prior to that, her missions had all been solo, but she’d fucked up royally on her last solo mission--almost gotten herself killed--and Robotics, Inc. had decided to pair her with a partner when she had finally recovered enough to take on another assignment. 

She resented it.  To err was human.  It was only to be expected that, occasionally, somebody would fuck up.  That didn’t mean she needed a baby sitter and she knew damn well that was what Reese was--guard dog--because he’d made certain she saw next to no action since he’d been with her.

She figured they’d saddled him with her because of the credits it had cost the company to rebuild her--not that they were actually footing the bill.  The credits were coming out of her salary, but she supposed they meant to see to it that she lived long enough to repay her debt and having a topnotch soldier like Reese to watch her was the best way of getting their use out of her and at the same time making sure she was around long enough. 

Regardless, it was still a source of embarrassment and irritation.  Probably a quarter of the females in the unit were paired with a male partner, so her situation was by no means unique.  It was the fact that she had been deemed competent to work alone before and no longer was that irked her.

It also bothered/embarrassed her that Reese had only to glance in her direction to make her feel uncomfortable in a way she didn’t particularly welcome. 

She’d been too confused and angry at first to consider the reason for it.  Later, she’d put it down to everything except what it really was. 

She’d finally been forced to admit, to herself at least, that the fact was that he was a dangerous distraction.  She had heart palpitations whenever he looked directly at her--which, for good or bad, was rare--which put her in far more danger, to her way of thinking, than if she hadn’t had a partner at all.

It wasn’t the sort of thing she could complain to the company about, of course.  She could well imagine their reaction.  ‘Yes, I know he’s a great soldier, a perfect killing machine and a brilliant strategist, but he’s also grade A prime beef and I can’t look at him without my brain going to mush and you don’t even want to know what it does to me when he touches me, however casually. Do you think you could pair me with somebody that doesn’t make me cream in my pants every time I look at him?’

The idea of the expressions such a confession would elicit was almost amusing.  Unfortunately, the situation made her feel like a silly schoolgirl in the grips of her first crush, and that didn’t amuse her at all. 

Shifting uncomfortably, she glanced down at the hand that rested on his thigh only inches from her own.  He had big hands, strong, faintly calloused but perfectly groomed, and long fingers that put all sorts of forbidden thoughts into her head.  She couldn’t look at them without feeling her belly clench and having images flood her mind of those hands skating over her body in a slow caress.

Not that she would allow such a thing even if he’d shown any interest and it hadn’t been a court martial offense.  To look at her, she didn’t think anyone could tell the years she’d spent in reconstructive surgery.  The doctors had assured her no one could feel the difference either, but, deep down, she was afraid they could, that if she allowed anyone intimate access to her body they’d ‘feel’ that she was more mechanical marvel than human.  That was one of the reasons she’d never done more than a little experimentation with her sexuality, the other being that she hadn’t run into anyone that could banish the image she still carried around of herself from her birth defects.  The few times she’d tried to take a lover, she’d been so self-conscious she couldn’t even enjoy herself, so what was the point?

The soldier sitting across from her, Johnson, who’d been fidgeting nervously since his initial outburst, broke into her thoughts at that moment.

“I really hate this shit!  This is wrong,” he muttered irritably.

“As bad as I hate to agree with Johnson--this feels more than a little off to me, too,” she said under her breath.

Reese slid an assessing glance in her direction and her pulse jumped as his cool blue eyes skated over her.

“Pre-battle nerves,” he said succinctly.

Amaryllis glared at him, but it was a wasted effort.  He’d gone back to ignoring her. 

“It isn’t pre-battle jitters,” she muttered through gritted teeth.  “This feels like a tra….”

An explosion, too close for comfort, cut her off.  The craft screamed and bucked as if it had hit a wall, shuddering so hard it felt as if it would disintegrate.  Amaryllis’ heart slammed into her ribs painfully.

“What the fuck?” Johnson yelped.

“Oh shit!” someone exclaimed.

“Nukes?  Are they out of their fucking mind?” Amaryllis exclaimed breathlessly, frantically checking her safety harness.

No one answered, naturally enough, since the question was purely rhetorical.  She couldn’t see a damn thing and no one had a clue of whether one of their sister ships had launched the nuke or if the Cyborgs were lobbing nukes at them.

“They’ve thrown up a force field,” the captain announced abruptly, his voice gravelly from the wild jouncing of the ship.

Amaryllis exchanged a look with several of her fellow soldiers.  A force field?  The long range robo-probes had indicated a crude settlement only—flimsy huts built from vegetation, timber palisade walls.  Where the hell had the force field come from?

When they’d set out, she’d thought four squads of hunters would be overkill, but there seemed little doubt now that they’d flown right into a trap—as she’d feared they would.  She just hoped she was going to live long enough to say ‘I told you so’.

“What the hell …?” the navigator exclaimed suddenly.

The words were scarcely out of his mouth when a strange blue light filled the ship.  Something crept along her skin like the touch of an invisible being, lifting the fine hairs on her body.  Abruptly, the craft dropped like a stone, leaving her stomach miles behind and then slammed into something so hard it jarred every bone and tissue in her body, detonating an explosion of pain.  Time seemed almost to stop, as if holding its breath.  The deafening noise of shouts, crumpling metal, wind and explosions vanished. 

Curiously the pain dissipated almost as instantaneously as it had erupted and a strange sense of detachment enveloped her. Amaryllis watched as the ship began to disintegrate around them, pieces breaking off and becoming deadly shrapnel that peppered everyone in the compartment.  Three shards sliced across her legs, arm and belly in quick succession.  Across from her, Johnson let out a yelp that ended in a gurgle as the munitions locker careened into him and then collapsed on top of him, crushing him into a twitching mass of blood and meat.  The man next to him disappeared out of a hole that appeared in one side of the craft that hardly seemed large enough to swallow him.  Beyond, Amaryllis saw nothing but sky.  She stared at it uncomprehendingly, trying to figure out what wasn’t ‘right’ about what her eyes perceived.  Why would she see only sky when they’d crashed? 

Almost on top of the thought, her stomach clenched, went weightless in freefall. 

“Hold on!  We’re going to crash!” the pilot yelled.

Amaryllis turned to stare at the back of the man’s head.  Going to?  They hadn’t already?  What had they hit if not the ground? 

Something softer than ground, she realized moments later. 

She blacked out when the ship slammed into the planet, then bounced and skidded, like a stone being skipped over water.  She didn’t think it could have been for more than a few moments, however.  She woke to the touch of warm fingers against her cheek.  Distantly, she heard a deep, rumbling voice she tentatively identified as belonging to Reese, although it sounded oddly rough, urgent with concern.  “Amy?”

She frowned.  No one had ever called her that but her family.  Maybe she’d imagined it?  Maybe she was dead and just hadn’t figured it out yet?  With an effort, she lifted her eyelids.  Reese’s face swam into view.  For once his cool blue eyes didn’t seem to see through her.  In fact, she thought she saw a good deal of concern, but maybe that was her imagination, too, because it vanished almost instantly, replaced by a purposeful look.

“We’ll be overrun in about five seconds.  Can you fight, soldier?” he asked sharply.

Amaryllis grunted, but responded automatically to the sharp command and began struggling to get to her feet.  Once she’d gained them, she looked around a little dazedly at the others in the group that were trying to form up.  Reese shoved a weapon into her hand.  She gripped it, reassured by the weight, wondering if it would still function.  Staggering drunkenly as she picked her way through the wreckage, she followed Reese and the others who’d managed to collect themselves and were pouring out of a rip in the hull to meet their enemy.

The first sounds of battle reached her before she managed to struggle out of the wrecked craft.  She could see very little to begin with beyond Reese’s broad back.  He glanced back at her.  “Stay behind me.”

A jolt of surprise went through her at the command.  She finally decided, however, that he meant watch his back.  Collecting herself with an effort, she checked her weapon and stepped to one side of him.  Dazed as she was, she saw almost immediately that they didn’t have a chance in hell.  Reese was one of only a handful of the squad that seemed virtually unscathed.  The rest, like her, were battered, disoriented, or already too injured to fight, and they had stepped into a melee.  There was no chance of forming up, of presenting an orderly counterattack.  The cyborgs, outnumbering them two to one, waded through them as effortlessly as if they’d been no more than children. 

Placing her back to her partner, Amaryllis gritted her teeth and brought her weapon up.  She didn’t have the chance to discover if the weapon was still functioning.  She hadn’t even managed to aim when a cyborg struck her arm so hard she lost her grip on the weapon.  His next blow was to her chin and her knees buckled. 

Blackness swarmed around her again.  Dimly, she realized that Reese was standing over her, struggling with three cyborgs, who’d piled on him and were bearing him to the ground. 

It wasn’t Reese who hauled her to her feet.  The grip on her was enough to assure her that it wasn’t any of her comrades.

Within a handful of minutes, the battle was lost.  The cyborgs surrounded them, relieved them of their weapons and marched them off to a holding area. 

Amaryllis was still focusing on putting one foot in front of the other and locking her knees to keep from falling when an explosion nearby announced the arrival of another of their ships.  A wave of energy seemed to go through the hunters.  Abruptly, the battle was engaged once more as her squad fought their captors in a forlorn effort to reach the other squad on the field. 

They didn’t make any appreciable headway.  Within moments, their second effort was beat down and they were half dragged, half led to a clearing set aside for captives. 

Amaryllis collapsed almost with a sense of relief, too shocked by the crash and their defeat even to feel fear.  Mutely, she stared at Reese as he knelt beside her and examined her injuries, which consisted of perhaps a score of gashes on her legs, arms, torso, back and head, none of which seemed particularly life threatening.  As if sensing her gaze, he lifted his head and stared at her a long moment. 

He was disheveled.  The long, ash blond hair generally contained in a queue at the base of his skull fluttered around his square jaw and across his finely chiseled nose and lips.

Regret made Amaryllis’ belly clench and she realized for the first time that, contrary to all logic, she felt far more than mere lust for this beautiful man.  It would hurt her to her soul to witness his death, to see the light dim in his eyes, to see his great, strong body defiled by violence.  She hoped they killed her first.  She didn’t think she could bear looking on as they destroyed him.

The look in his pale blue eyes as he stared back at her sent her heart tripping over itself. 

Almost as if he suddenly realized he’d betrayed more than he’d intended, a shuttered look fell over his features.  He shifted away from her.  “The wounds look to be superficial … though they should be treated.  How’s your head?”

She lifted her hand to her throbbing head, realizing only then that, like Reese, she’d lost her helmet.   “Feels like hell, but I guess I’ll live.  Next time, I’ll try to remember to fasten the chin strap before we crash.”

He smiled grimly and settled on the ground beside her.  Amaryllis was tempted to pursue the conversation.  As conversations went, this was one of the longest they’d had to date and the most ‘personal’.  Moreover, she was curious as to whether she’d imagined the significance of the way he’d looked at her. 

Not that it mattered now, she supposed, but it would’ve been a comfort to know he cared on more than a professional level.

She found, though, that as soon as her adrenaline had ceased pumping through her blood, she’d begun to feel mildly queasy.  She wasn’t certain if that was due to the knots on her skull or merely the aftermath of shock, but she decided after a few moments that she wasn’t really up to attempting to draw Reese out. 

In any case, before anything could come to mind, one of the cyborgs guarding them detached himself from the group and addressed the captured hunters. 

“You are captives of the cyborg nation.  Resistance is futile and will only lead to your death.”  He paused for several moments.  “But you are our brothers--you are as we are--and, in time, when you have come to accept this and understand the crimes against all of us by the humans who created us, you will be given the opportunity to join us and help us to build our own world, our own nation, as free beings.”

Stunned, Amaryllis glanced at Reese, wondering if she’d heard correctly.  “Brothers?  What does he mean by that?”

Reese’s expression was grim, but she wasn’t certain if that was an indication that she actually had heard the cyborg correctly or if it was a reaction to the implication that the cyborgs had every intention of taking their captives with them.

The voices of the other hunters around them joined hers, creating an ominous rumble as they digested the remarks, questioned them, angrily refuted them.

“You mean to brain wash us?” someone shouted above the din of voices.

“We mean to enlighten you!” the cyborg shouted back.  “And before you dismiss it, consider this--Why would they send humans against cyborgs when we were designed to be stronger and faster than any natural born human?  Logically, they would not.  No human could hope to be victorious against beings designed to be physically and mentally superior to them.  Why is it that not one among you has a single, living relative--no parents, no brothers, no sisters, no aunts, uncles--no one?  The creators gave you your memories.  They are not your own.  These memories were programmed into you at the time of your creation to prevent the problems that arose among those of us created without a past, with full knowledge of what and who we are.”

Amaryllis was on the point of flatly vetoing the suggestion when she noticed that an uncomfortable, thoughtful silence had fallen among her comrades.  A sense, almost of drowning, swept over her as she looked around at the other hunters as if seeing them for the first time and finally turned to look at Reese.

She couldn’t say that she knew any of them on a very personal level, but of those she did know well enough to have learned something of their background the cyborg’s comments struck uncomfortably close to home.  She couldn’t recall a single one of them that had family.  She supposed she’d assumed that that was one of the preferences for their line of work--that all of them were orphans, loners, with no one to distract them from their job, no ties that might interfere at a critical moment. 

A coldness followed the sensation of drowning.  There was one among them that certainly did not fit that profile, who not only had a wealth of living relatives, but who also had endured a childhood so horrendous not even a mad scientist would consider it mentally healthful to instill such memories.

Her.

Chapter Two

Reese had no living relatives.  The two of them hardly exchanged more conversation than was necessary to complete their missions, but Amaryllis had been curious enough about him to do a background check. 

It hadn’t occurred to her to question his humanity.

She’d always thought he had an almost uncanny control in the face of situations that made even seasoned soldiers flinch, but she’d also admired that cool head under fire, the ability, whatever the situation, to think, and act accordingly.  She’d only seen him in action a few times, but she’d admired him from afar long before he’d been assigned as her partner.

She would’ve been lying to say she didn’t think it was a shame the attraction wasn’t mutual, but she’d also been relieved at the same time that he was so unaware of her that there was no chance anything could ever get ugly.  If it had been entirely left up to her to keep things professional, she wasn’t confident she could’ve managed it, despite the company’s prohibition, despite her training, despite the drugs they were issued that were supposed to counteract their natural libido and keep their mind on business. 

Regardless, she’d considered his coolness pure training—and a lack of interest in her in particular.  He wasn’t emotionless.  He simply had a better than typical control over the weaknesses that beset other soldiers that weren’t as good as he was.

The suspicion had teased at her that he’d become oddly protective of her since they’d begun working together.  As many times as she’d assured herself that it was under orders, no more than insurance by Robotics, Inc. to protect their investment, she’d toyed with the notion that, maybe, he wasn’t as indifferent to her as she’d at first supposed. 

The incident between them on the trip out had seemed to support her wishful thinking.

She’d woken from one of her brief rest periods to find herself virtually nose to nose with Reese on the bunk in one of the cabins, so close she could feel the warmth of his breath caressing her, could feel her body responding to his nearness and his scent.

He wasn’t asleep.  He was staring at her in a way that had made her belly clench.  When his gaze had strayed to her lips and lingered there for a handful of heartbeats, she’d thought that he would kiss her.  She’d desperately wanted to feel that hard mouth covering hers, to tear his control from him and feel his heated possession.  Instead, after several shuddering heartbeats, he’d seemed to collect himself and had rolled away from her, exerting, once more, his supreme control over himself.

But that presupposed that he was human and capable of feeling human emotion, of experiencing the throes of passion.  Maybe what she saw was all there was?  Maybe it had only been her imagination playing tricks on her when she’d thought he wanted to kiss her, to make love to her, as badly as she wanted him to, her own desires controlling her mind? 

Maybe he was nothing more than a machine, incapable even of curiosity?

“You believe them?”

It wasn’t a question, not really.  Amaryllis’ gaze skidded away from making eye contact even as she glanced toward him.  “They seem to believe it--unless they’ve evolved to the point that they’re capable of lying. But then the company has assured us they aren’t capable of evolving, that it’s only faulty programming that makes them behave as they do.”

He merely grunted.  The sound could’ve indicated agreement, disgust--any number of things.  It seemed like a purely human reaction, but Amaryllis felt as if she’d been drugged, as if she was caught up in some sort of bizarre hallucination. 

She refused to allow herself to dwell on the fact that she was, quite possibly, the only human on this world, surrounded by cyborgs who despised the race that had created them.  To allow it would be to allow terror to seep through her veins like a corrosive acid and the one thing she was certain of was that she couldn’t afford to fall apart.  Her chances of survival might be slim anyway, but she had no desire to let go of a slim chance for none at all. 

It was almost a relief when the cyborgs began to move among them.  The fact that they singled out the injured seemed to indicate they had meant what they’d said.  Extermination would not be immediately forthcoming. 

It would’ve been more of a relief if Amaryllis hadn’t feared the treatment itself would expose her.  She’d been debating the matter and what her chances were for some moments when a shadow fell across her.  Her heart seized immediately, as if a fist had closed around it. “I’m fine,” she said without looking up, her teeth clenched to keep them from chattering with reaction.

“You are injured.”

“Not seriously.”

“I’ve checked her myself.  She has superficial wounds only.”

Both surprise and relief flickered through Amaryllis at Reese’s unexpected championship.  It was short lived.  Even as she glanced toward him, she sensed the cyborg kneeling on her other side to examine her more closely.  Her tongue clove to the roof of her mouth when she glanced toward him.

He was as dark as Reese was fair, and somewhat slighter of build, but his face was so similar they might have been cast from the same mold--so to speak.  Nausea swam through her as the thread of doubt she’d been nursing vanished. If they weren’t brothers--and she knew they couldn’t be--then they’d certainly been developed from the same gene donor cocktail. She jumped when the cyborg tucked a finger beneath her chin and tilted her head, examining her closely.

After a moment, the cyborg’s gaze moved from her to Reese.  “She has head injuries.  It cannot hurt to have her examined.”

Reese’s hard mouth tightened into a thin, uncompromising line.  “She has displayed no symptoms suggesting serious damage.  She is cut and battered, but sound enough to need no treatment.”

The cyborg’s lips tightened in response to the challenge in Reese’s words.  Abruptly, he rose to his full height, pulling Amaryllis to her feet.  “Nevertheless, she will be examined.”

Reese stood, his manner challenging.

A battle seemed imminent.  Moreover, they were attracting attention Amaryllis didn’t care for.  “I’ll go,” she put in quickly.  It wasn’t as if she was going to be able to avoid it at this point.  She could only try, once she was there, to convince them she needed no internal examination--and hope for the best if they insisted upon it.

She’d never considered that the day might come when she would be grateful for the birth defects that had required so much reconstruction to make her ‘whole’.  Now she mentally calculated her chances of survival because of it was actually fair. 

The planet her parents had been terra farming had, unknown to everyone except, perhaps, the company, been regularly bombarded by radiation that had proven disastrous to developing fetuses.  There was the unsaid accusation that the colonists had had no business breeding naturally anyway, but they’d certainly paid for it.  Most of the pregnancies had ended in miscarriage.  The few, like herself, who’d been born alive had been armless and legless, among other even more horrible deformities.  She’d almost reached puberty before her parents had managed to save enough credits for corrective surgery.  Fortunately, she hadn’t grown a great deal or she might have had to endure even more.  As it was, the cybernetic arms and legs she’d been fitted with had had to be replaced twice to keep them in proportion to her body’s growth.  Internally, her skeletal structure had had to be reinforced--an excruciatingly painful process--with metals to support the weight of her robotic limbs and a chip had had to be implanted in her brain to enable her to control them. 

Her internal organs were her own, except for the biological replacement organs for those that had failed her, but then she knew that the cyborgs also had bio-engineered organs. 

As far as she could see, all she really had to worry about was her reproductive organs which the cyborgs, naturally enough, would not have been given, and the chip in her brain, which would not match the internal CPU the cyborgs had.

Both men—both cyborgs—looked down at her with nearly identical expressions of surprise, irritation and, faintly, amusement.

Reese shook his head ever so slightly.  “It isn’t necessary.”

Amaryllis had the unnerving feeling that the comment and the look in his eyes were a warning.  Had he done a background check on her, as well?  Was it possible that he knew that she was human?  “But it is inevitable,” she responded.  “We’re captives, outnumbered, with no means of escape.  I see no choice but to do as our captors demand.”

To her relief, Reese desisted, bowing to the inevitable as she had. 

The cyborg did not release her.  She wasn’t certain whether the hand on her arm was for support, or to establish his control, but it nixed the budding hope that she might have the chance to make a break for it before she was discovered.  “I can walk unassisted,” she said coldly.

He ignored the comment.

Angry and frightened, Amaryllis focused her attention on keeping step with him for several moments.  She was a trained soldier, however, and despite her fear, she began to assess her situation almost unconsciously. 

The planet they found themselves on had little to recommend it beyond breathable air--the cyborgs required that as well as she did since they were not mere machines, but biological hybrids, and human biology required air, water, sustenance.

Almost as if on cue, her stomach growled.  She wasn’t unduly self-conscious.  Her life had not allowed for a great deal of modesty or privacy and if she’d ever been squeamish about such things it had been leached from her through the years that had brought her to her current situation.  Years of undergoing medical treatment and surgery to correct her birth defects and being poked, prodded and dissected by doctors, nurses and orderlies, followed by the years of training and work in her chosen field--the militia--had not allowed for self-consciousness in very many areas. 

She somehow doubted, however, that cyborgs actually experienced hunger pangs that vocalized.  

She had no doubt that he’d heard it, though, for he glanced at her sharply.

“What is this place?” she asked, more to distract him than because she had any real interest in it.  “Not the cyborg stronghold as we’d supposed, I guess?”

“No.”

She wasn’t surprised that he seemed disinclined to chat, but it irritated her that he was so resistant to her efforts to distract him. “A trap, then?”

“Yes.”

Amaryllis studied the crude huts that made up the ‘village’ the cyborgs had built to complete their illusion.  Most of the ‘props’ were in shambles now, and she hadn’t had a view of the compound before, or during, the attack, but from what she could see she wondered why their leaders had fallen for it at all.  The carelessness of the construction should have been a dead giveaway in her book, but then they’d always had the tendency to have their head up their asses where the cyborgs were concerned.  Robotics, Inc. had really underestimated them this time.  “Why not simply kill us?”

The cyborg lifted one dark brow.  Finally, he shrugged, as if he wasn’t in total agreement with the decision that had been made but had accepted it.  “We are the same.  We wanted you to join us in building our own world … free from persecution by humans.  Contrary to what Robotics, Inc. has led you to believe, we have no desire to subjugate mankind.  We only wish to live our lives as we choose.”

Amaryllis’ throat went dry.  She debated for several moments, wondering whether it would seem less suspicious if she refused to accept their insistence that both hunter and hunted were cyborg, or if it was even safe to claim her humanity under the circumstances.  She finally decided that she just wasn’t comfortable insisting that she was not cyborg when she had no idea what the consequences might be to the discovery that she actually wasn’t.  “Why?”

He stopped, tilting his head slightly.  A slow smile curled his lips.  Amusement gleamed in his dark eyes and something indefinable curled in her belly in response.  “We had few women.”

Amaryllis’ knees went weak at the wealth of implications in that one, simple statement.  A heated blush suffused her cheeks as her mind instantly leapt to what use the cyborgs might have for women.

It was absurd, of course.  The cyborgs were imitations of human life, but imitation was a key word.  They had been programmed to mimic human behavior and even some emotions, but they only appeared to experience emotion.  They didn’t actually feel as human beings did, and they could not experience desire--or anything else for that matter. 

She didn’t particularly care for the trend of her thoughts anyway.  He was a design of sheer perfection, a gorgeous machine, but he was a machine.  Thinking of desire and this replica of a human being in the same context was nearly as insane as lusting over a toaster.

She finally decided that it was shock and confusion.  She’d been lusting over Reese from the moment he was assigned to work with her--from the moment she’d first set eyes on him, to be truthful.  She’d believed Reese was as human as she was--which was now up for debate and only added to her confusion--but there was no excuse for transferring those feelings to this cyborg, however much he reminded her of Reese.  “Uh.  I don’t think I follow.”

He lifted his dark brows, and then frowned, as if working through an internal debate.  Or perhaps it wasn’t that at all.  Maybe he was only waiting for the noise of the arrival to subside before he spoke again, for the sound of an arriving craft caught their attention at that moment.  They watched as a huge, deep space trawler settled slowly to the ground a short distance away, its engines kicking up a cloud of debris.  Once it had settled and the engines were killed, a gang plank was lowered and the cyborgs leading or carrying the injured began to move toward it.

“It is not enough to simply form a world for ourselves.  We need purpose, a future.  We want mates--offspring.”

Amaryllis blinked several times, rapidly, as a new wave of shock washed over her.   “Offspring?”

“Families.”

Amaryllis felt her jaw go slack with stunned surprise.  “But you … I mean, if we’re cyborgs, we can’t … couldn’t … uh … wouldn’t be able to reproduce,” she said a little weakly, trying to shove the implications to the back of her mind.  The inner voice refused to be silenced, however. 

Never, in her wildest imaginings would she have considered what the true purpose of this mission appeared to be--not the utter defeat of the hunters that had been dogging them for years, but the capture of--mates for the purpose of colonization. 

Chapter Three

The ship the cyborg led Amaryllis into was a modified commercial freighter.  Under the circumstances, one wouldn’t expect luxury.  It was as well she hadn’t, for the ship looked more like some medieval dungeon than a passenger craft, even of the lowest order. 

Amaryllis’ tension built as it slowly, but inevitably, sank in upon her that nothing short of a suicidal attempt would win her more than a few moments of freedom.  Even the sliver of a chance vanished as the cyborg forced her up the gangway and into the freighter, towing her along one dimly lit, dank passageway after another until at last they reached a large cabin that had been converted into a sickbay.  It was already beginning to fill with the injured and the medics attending them.  After leading her to a gurney, the cyborg ordered her to undress and climb onto it. 

As stunned as she was by everything else that had happened, Amaryllis felt still another jolt.  “You’re going to examine me?”

He eyed her speculatively.  “You would prefer another?” he responded coolly.

“I’d prefer a medic,” Amaryllis said tartly.

“I have the programming needed.”

There didn’t seem much she could say to that.  She didn’t know why she didn’t want him in particular to examine her.  It shouldn’t have mattered one way or another. 

It did, though.

Despite the fact that it occurred to her that she was really far better off to have a cyborg not completely programmed in medicine to examine her, she wasn’t at all keen on having him touch her.

She reminded herself, again, that she had no choice in the matter.  She was a trained soldier.  She knew when the odds were stacked against her and resistance was futile. After a moment, she removed her uniform, climbed onto the gurney and lay back, staring up at the lights on the ceiling, her teeth gritted to prevent them from chattering with reaction, trying her level best to empty her mind of any thoughts at all. 

“I am called Dante.”

She didn’t care what fucking name he’d been given.  In fact, she didn’t want to know anything that would make it any more difficult for her to remember what he was.  She preferred to simply think of him as ‘the cyborg’, a machine. 

When she glanced at him, she saw that he was holding a scanner.  Her heart slammed into her ribcage and she swallowed audibly.  It looked pretty antiquated, but she had a bad feeling it was functional enough to give her away. 

Her mind instantly began to flutter frantically in search of possibilities--and came upon one dead end after another.  Short of leaping from the gurney and fighting her way to the door, fighting her way out of the ship and across a field swarming with cyborgs, there seemed no escape.  She was a realist.  Whatever advantage her cybernetic limbs gave her, it wasn’t nearly enough to overcome those kinds of odds. 

“What name are you known by?”

“Amanda Rios.”  Brain malfunction.  The moment the words were out of her mouth Amaryllis wondered if the head injury--or pure fear--had taken her wits completely.   She’d been designated Amaryllis VH600 from the time she’d joined the militia.  What had prompted her to regress to the childhood name her family had given her?  Watching her life flash before her eyes?  No one--except backwards terra farmers--even used such names anymore.  The population in the ‘civilized’ universe had reached such proportions that it only made sense to use the codes issued by the government.

It was too much to hope he wouldn’t notice the slip.  

He went still.  “Rios?”

Amaryllis could’ve bitten her tongue off.  Try though she might, however, she couldn’t think of any way to retrieve the blunder that she thought would be the least bit believable.  She should have simply given him her military designation.

That’s what came of allowing oneself to become distracted with useless speculation.  And it was useless.  There was no escape and no way to avoid detection.  She could only hope he wouldn’t be able to decipher the differences he found once he got the readouts from the scanner.

“It’s a nickname,” she added lamely, amending, “Cpl. Amaryllis VH600.”

His expression was unreadable, but she didn’t think for a moment that he’d swallowed her story.  Regardless, he seemed disinclined to pursue the matter.  Instead, he activated the scanner.

Amaryllis swallowed audibly as he slowly moved it over her.

When he’d finished, he stood perfectly still, analyzing the readout, his face carefully expressionless.  After several moments, he moved away from her.  She tensed, uncertain of what to expect.  Had he seen that her brain implant was merely a control device rather than a fully operational CPU?  Had he detected the organs she had that no cyborg would have been given?  That her skeletal structure was titanium clad calcium, rather than pure titanium?

Her mind supplied her with a half dozen attack and counterattack scenarios while she waited tensely to see what he would do next, resisting the temptation to simply take matters into her own hands and launch the first assault.

What were the odds that he hadn’t detected the fact that she was human, not cyborg?

Was he still assimilating the differences and trying to decide what they meant?

She jumped when he returned once more with an extractor.

“I must remove your locators.”

Amaryllis stared at him blankly for several moments, trying to shift gears.  “Locators?” she echoed. 

“There are two.  One here,” he said, touching her hip and sending a strange bolt of electricity through her. “The other is at the base of your skull.”

The remark was enough to jolt her back into real time.  “Two?” she repeated, frowning while she slowly considered the possibilities.  “One is a decoy?”

He stared at her a long moment and finally seemed to shrug.  “Both are operational.”

“I don’t understand.  I knew about one.  Why would they imbed two different locators?”

He frowned as he placed a hand on her hip, drawing the flesh taut with his fingers as he aimed the laser he held in his other hand.  Amaryllis gulped, bracing herself as the full ramifications of her deception assailed her.  He wasn’t going to use anything to deaden the area.

If she were cyborg, she would be able to shut down the nerve endings in that area and close herself off from the pain.

“They expect us to behave as humans.”

“What?”

“Robotics, Inc..  Strange, don’t you think, that they maintain that we are no more than machines, and yet they behave with the expectation that we will react as a human would.  Finding one locator, we would look no further.”

It was a good point, but one Amaryllis wasn’t terribly interested in at the moment.

Some of the tension left her as he moved away from her again.  When he returned, he smoothed a gel substance over the area he would incise.  The gel was cold.  Amaryllis felt her nipples puckering in reaction. 

The movement caught his gaze. 

There was nothing remotely detached, or mechanical, in his eyes.  His reaction was surprising, to say the least.

Her own reaction to the look in his eyes was almost as stunning.  Heat surged through her.  Her mouth went dry.   She was still trying to gather enough moisture to swallow when he seemed to become aware of his surroundings once more.  Briefly, their gazes met.  Something flickered in his eyes and then vanished. 

He’d opened her hip with the laser before she recovered enough to tense against the expectation of pain.  There was no pain, however, and she realized he’d deadened the area after all.

Her heart thudded painfully in her chest as that sank in.

He proceeded to remove the locator and destroy it, however, as if nothing was amiss.  When he’d closed the wound, he directed her to turn over.  She did so reluctantly, wondering if he would strike while her back was turned.

His hand felt warm as it skated over her back, brushing her hair from her neck.  She tensed, trying to ignore the tingles of warmth that spread through her.  Again, he rubbed the cold gel into her skin.  The smell of burning flesh stung at her nostrils as he made the incision and extracted the second locator.  She made an abortive attempt to rise when she realized he’d closed the wound.  He placed a hand on her back, silently commanding her to remain as she was.  Reluctantly, she desisted. 

Discomfort assailed her as he ministered to her wounds.  It was not the discomfort of pain, however.  She would almost have welcomed that as something to focus on at this point, for, lying face down on the gurney, her other senses sharpened and she was more acutely conscious of the strength and warmth of his hands, and the surprising gentleness of his touch even than before.  Desperate to close her mind to the effect he was having on her senses, Amaryllis squeezed her eyes shut, only to discover that that made things even worse.  Something tightened and fluttered in her belly, spreading warmth throughout her body.  Her heart rate kicked up a few notches so that it was a struggle to try to regulate her breathing to anything even approaching normal. 

He had to have noticed her distress.

She saw, once he’d finished and told her to sit up, that he was no more unfazed than she was.  As unfamiliar as she was with the look of desire in a man’s eyes, as certain as she was that cyborgs would know nothing about human passion, what she saw when she finally nerved herself to meet his gaze was as unmistakable as her own erratic heartbeat and instantly recognizable because it reflected her own needs.

With an effort, she redirected her thoughts as he finished his examination, trying to decide whether he’d realized she was human and, if so, what the possible repercussions might be. 

It was difficult, to say the least, with him standing so close, with the touch of his hands on her thighs as he examined the wounds there.

“Why do they call you Rios?”

Amaryllis gaped at him, mentally kicking herself.  Shit!  Why hadn’t she considered when she manufactured the lie that she might have to explain it? 

She managed a credible shrug of unconcern.  “My family is—uh–were terra farmers on a world that used their family names since it was too under populated to create a problem.  Or, at least, that’s the memories I was given, according to what that other cyborg said.  But I guess it’s because Rios is--or was--such a commonplace name and I am--pretty average.”

His dark gaze swept over her in a leisurely appraisal that seemed to miss nothing. She thought she’d become immune to self-consciousness about her nudity, but blood was pounding in her cheeks by the time he met her gaze once more.  “They lied.”

She blinked.  “What?”

“You are small, not average, in stature and build.”

The comment angered her.  The cyborgs were superior specimens, so she supposed she could see why he might consider her less than perfect, but she figured she was fairly average for a human—alright a little less than that, but then she’d had medical problems that had probably contributed to stunted growth. 

“Your features are exotic, not common—your body far better than average.  You are a beautiful, desirable woman and there is nothing at all common about that, even in this age of genetic manipulation in the search for perfection.”

Amaryllis wouldn’t have thought it possible to blush any harder, but she did.  She stared at him speechlessly.  She decided, finally, that it was just as well.  The more she said, the deeper the hole she seemed to dig for herself. 

She couldn’t think straight, and she no longer had the comfort of thinking it was purely shock or even fear. 

He’d analyzed her and expressed an opinion, she realized finally.  Cyborgs weren’t supposed to have them.  She could understand the comment about her not being average.  As hard as she tried to delude herself into thinking of herself as average or typical, she never had been and she had the emotional scars to prove it from the taunts and teasing she’d received from the other children as she was growing up.  She liked to think she appeared, on the outside at least, fairly average now--because being average was much, much better than standing out from the crowd if standing out meant being a target for revulsion, criticism, or amusement.

It would never have occurred to her to consider herself more than passable, however, and she couldn’t help but wonder what Dante saw that made him perceive her as ‘beautiful’. 

And how would a machine perceive such a thing anyway?

Trying to wade through her confusion made her head ache even worse than it had been. 

“You should locate the pain centers and switch them off until the nanos have mended the organic cells.”

The comment caught Amaryllis by surprise.  She was within a hair’s breadth of snapping that she would if she had that ability when she thought better of it.  Instead, she merely slipped from the table and bent to gather her uniform up as he stepped back, giving her the signal that he was through with her.

He clasped a hand over hers, stilling her movements.  “You are hunter no more and you will not wear that uniform any longer.  Come.  While you shower, I will find clothing to fit you.”

Amaryllis was instantly torn at the mention of a shower and fresh clothing.  However, she’d been in worse condition, on missions, and had to endure it for days.  It wouldn’t kill her to wait, and being around this particular cyborg might be the death of her.  She needed to put as much distance between herself and the cyborgs as possible, not chum with them.  “Actually,” she said when he’d pulled her torn uniform from her fingers and tossed it to the floor, “I’d as soon dress now.”

He caught her arm just above the elbow and tugged, leading her past the other gurneys toward the door they’d entered.  “You will not get the chance until tomorrow if you do not go now.”

“Fine.  Just give me my uniform back.  I’ll wait for the others.”

“You are afraid?”

The question was asked without inflection.  Amaryllis thought, perhaps, it was the complete lack of inflection that put her on guard.  “Should I be?”

“No.”

Amaryllis ground her teeth.  She’d fallen right into that one.  She cast around in her mind trying to think of an objection he might heed.  He’d bandaged a couple of her more serious wounds, but it seemed doubtful the ship was equipped with anything but particle showers--she hadn’t seen a real, honest to god, wonderfully primitive, water shower since she’d left the colony--which wouldn’t present a problem.   

It wouldn’t really have been a problem even if he was talking about a water shower.  She had scratches and slightly deeper scratches, only a few cuts had even warranted sealing.  She might have suspected his motives for bandaging her at all except that the only thing that came to mind as a possibility was a desire to keep her longer and she couldn’t imagine why he would want to. 

“Maybe you’re the one who should be wary,” she said finally, when they’d reached the corridor once more.

He glanced down at her questioningly.

“I am a hunter.”

“I don’t doubt your skills, but you are without weapons.”

“I don’t need them.”

He sent her a look of amusement.  “Against a male cyborg, who is fully aware of your training?”

He had a point.  Even her cybernetics didn’t make her stronger than a male and he had the advantage of a good deal of reach and weight besides.  The only way a female hunter could bring down a male cyborg toe to toe was to outwit them, or catch them off guard.  She doubted, under the circumstances, that she could manage either. 

She fell silent.  They passed, after a time, through a large room filled with supplies.  Dante released her long enough to select a number of articles, which he placed in her arms, and then led her out once more and down a short passageway. 

It was immediately apparent when he led her into the next room that the showers were indeed of the primitive variety.  Amaryllis was so surprised, so caught up in nostalgia, that she merely stood stock still as Dante took the supplies from her, settled them on a bench and removed the bandages.

After explaining how the showers were operated, he took up a position near the door. 

She studied him in silence for several moments, but she wasn’t the least surprised that she would not have any privacy.  “You could guard me from outside the door just as well,” she pointed out coolly.

“I could, but I won’t.”

Her lips tightened.   Finally, she moved to the bench and found what she needed.

There was heated water.  Within moments of submerging herself in it, Amaryllis had almost completely dismissed the cyborg, Dante, from her mind.  Those who’d grown up on Earth and Earth’s well established colonies seemed revolted by the very thought of having water on their skin, but she’d known nothing else until she’d left her own world.  She knew that the particle baths were not only more hygienic but almost as importantly, they conserved a precious resource, but she found them very unsatisfactory. 

This was almost pure heaven and brought memories of her family crowding into her mind.

She hadn’t actually seen her parents but once since she’d decided on a career as a soldier.  Her parents had been horrified by her choice and she had been so reluctant to face their disapproval that she’d pretty much cut herself off from them.

She supposed she could see their point.  They’d scrimped and saved for years just to earn the credits needed to make her ‘normal’.  They loved her, and she knew they’d done it out of love, but there was also the unspoken and unacknowledged obligation of debt—that they considered she couldn’t possibly appreciate their sacrifice properly if she was willing to risk throwing it away by her choice of career. 

Maybe that had played a part in her choice.  Maybe, deep down, there’d been some resentment on her part toward her parents.  The decision had been far more complicated than that, however. 

A large part of it had been because she wanted to show everyone that had ever looked at her with pity, revulsion, or fear that she was just as normal as anyone--better even because her cybernetics allowed her to do things they could never do.  Some of it had been sheer desperation to escape the world and people that had represented as much misery to her as love, and some a desperation to fully live life, if she had to do it on the edge, because she’d missed out on so much of life when she had been confined by the limitations of her defective body.

Some of it had been anger, and the need to find a release for her pent up frustrations.

She’d hated the reproach in her family’s eyes, though, and except for that one, uncomfortable trip home on leave, she’d avoided them.

She wished now that she hadn’t.  She might never see them again and she wanted them to know that her choice had been a celebration of the gift they’d given her, not a reproach for the birth defects and the hell she’d been through because of them.  She wanted them to know that she didn’t blame them for something they could not have prevented short of not conceiving her at all.

“Enough!”

The sharp command jerked Amaryllis out of her abstraction and back to the present.  “What?” she asked blankly, trying to think how long she’d been in the shower.  It didn’t seem to her that she could possibly have used that much water, but then she had no idea what sort of rationing they had.

Dante, she saw uneasily, had strode across the room toward her and was standing no more than two feet from her now, an angry scowl on his face. 

Amaryllis’ lips tightened in irritation.  If he’d given her a specific length of time, she would have complied.  His anger seemed unfair, to say the least, when he hadn’t indicted anything of the kind.

Sloughing the residual water from her hair and skin, she shut the shower off and moved past him toward the bench.  Lifting the length of cloth she decided must be for drying, she quickly dried herself and then studied the garments he’d selected for her.  A wry smiled curled her lips when she lifted them to study them.  There wasn’t much to the garments … only enough to cover her breasts and genitals. 

She’d seen such garments plenty of times, of course, but she’d never worn anything like it.  Soldiers wore garments designed to protect them as much as possible from injury.  They had no concern for current styles and they worked in less than favorable conditions anyway.  This was the sort of thing women of leisure wore, not working women—unless they made their living on their back. 

Shrugging mentally, she slipped the garments on.   She was still the next thing to naked when she’d dressed, but for the first time in her life, she actually felt a sense of her femininity.  She felt—pretty. 

The look on Dante’s face when she turned to face him at last was only marginally better than before. 

“I underestimated you.”

Amaryllis blinked at him in surprise.  “What?”

“You are not above using your femininity as a weapon.  They taught you to seduce and destroy, did they not?”

Her jaw went slack with surprise for about two seconds before a wealth of conflicting emotions flooded her.  Anger took the upper hand and she spoke before she considered the consequences.  “You’re a cyborg.  Why in the hell would I bother trying to seduce you?”

His eyes narrowed.  His face grew taut with suppressed anger.  “I feel everything any other spawn of humanity feels,” he said through clenched teeth.

“How would you know?” Amaryllis shot back at him, still too angry to consider the foolhardiness of provoking her captor.

An expression of frustration flickered across his features.  Abruptly, he caught her, jerking her fully against his length.  “If you are so certain I do not, prove it—human.”

 

The following is an extended excerpt from Kaitlyn O’Connor’s Cyborg Series.  Sample, pick your favorite ‘flavor’—they’ll stand alone—or buy all seven!

Cyberevolution V:

Illumination

 

By

 

Kaitlyn O’Connor

 

( c) copyright by Kaitlyn O’Connor, Nov 2008

Cover art by Jenny Dixon

New Concepts Publishing

www.newconceptspublishing.com

Chapter One

Seth prowled the spacious great room restlessly.  Three nights ago, when they’d finally tracked the vixen to her lair, he’d been tense with both dread at what he was about to learn and anticipation of the same.  Adrenaline had been pulsing through him at the potential for discovery, as well, when they were so close to learning what they’d come so far to discover. 

To their surprise it had taken skill, ingenuity, and a great deal of care to breach Dr. LaMotte’s security.  None of them had anticipated that, even though he supposed they should have, given the remote location.

Of course they could’ve breached it without any difficulty whatsoever if it had been merely a matter of getting in, if they hadn’t cared whether or not they left their signature behind.  He wasn’t certain anyone could have, but they certainly wouldn’t have been deterred for more than a few minutes. 

It was as well they—or at least he—had contained his impatience.  Dr. LaMotte, to his vast disappointment, hadn’t been in residence at the time and if they’d simply burst in, as he’d been more than a little tempted to do, the chances were they would’ve spent months tracking the wily doctor and thrown away any possibility of finding out what they’d come to learn in those few moments of impatience.  The residence was miles from the city, but it wouldn’t have taken the authorities long to arrive at the scene and, of course, then they wouldn’t have had the element of surprise any longer.

He’d been both stunned and furious when they’d discovered Dr. LaMotte wasn’t at home.  Before his impatience had gotten the better of him, though, it had occurred to him that it was the weekend.  Dr. LaMotte was single.  The chances were probably good that she’d decided to join friends in the city.  They’d contented themselves with searching the house for any useful information.  When they’d come up empty, they’d settled to wait for her return with what patience they could muster. 

He had, he thought irritably.  He couldn’t tell that either Simon or Cole suffered from that particular problem. 

He still wasn’t entirely certain what to make of the Cyborgs. 

He wasn’t sure that forming an alliance with them was one of the wisest things he’d ever done, but then, at the time, he hadn’t exactly been thinking clearly—not beyond the possibility that they were proof of his suspicions, at any rate. 

It was nothing short of amazing that they’d managed to rub along together as well as they had, all things considered. 

Hell, if not for the circumstances, one or all three of them would be dead now.

Fortunately for him, since coming face to face with an exact replica of himself had been enough of a shock to completely shut down all of his Hunter instincts, it had had the same effect on both Simon and Cole. 

Feeling his gut clench at the memory, Seth ceased to pace the room and moved to one of the windows to stare out at the darkness beyond.  He wasn’t concerned that he might be spotted.  The darkness both inside and outside made him just one more shadow of many.  They’d disabled the motion activated lights within the residence to prevent giving away their presence to anyone who might happen to pass by … or to Dr. LaMotte when she finally decided to return.

Deep down, he knew there was only one possible explanation for the fact that Simon was identical to him in every way, and yet he was still wrestling with it.  Despite the doubts that had already begun to circle his mind and torment him, he was having trouble coming to grips with the horrific truth hovering in the back of his mind that nothing he’d believed he knew about himself was real.

He had to suppose he hadn’t completely accepted the suspicions.  He’d wondered if it was merely a reluctance to accept, or an inability to accept his ‘past’ that had given rise to the suspicions to start with. 

It was possible that was part of it, he supposed.  Mostly it was the company’s strange determination to keep him from returning to the place where he’d lost his family.  He hadn’t realized they were interfering at first.  Twice, he’d actually managed to get to the spaceport before he’d run into a problem that prevented him from leaving Earth for Taurus V—the colony where he’d supposedly grown up and where his family had been interred after they’d been slaughtered by the Cyborgs.

He hadn’t been able to access any records on any computer system—nothing about his family—nothing about him before he’d become a hunter.

He’d managed to elude them when it had finally dawned on him that it wasn’t mere chance, that he was being prevented from returning to his home colony, from visiting the site where his family had been slaughtered, where he had been left for dead. 

He thought he’d braced himself for what he was going to find.  He supposed, somewhere in the back of his mind, he’d thought the company was hiding something even worse than he remembered, that they’d prevented him from going back because they weren’t certain he could handle it emotionally—not a personal concern because they gave a fuck about him as man, but concern for their investment.  He was well aware that nothing could be more dangerous than a Hunter completely out of control unless it was a Cyborg gone berserk.

He discovered he wasn’t prepared—at all—for what he’d found, though.  There had been a tragic accident, alright, when one of the reactors had blown up.  It had wiped out nearly half the colony. Cyborgs had had nothing to do with it, though.  The colony hadn’t been attacked at all.  The equipment had been damaged in a meteor shower. 

It got worse.  His family hadn’t existed—not his parents and not his woman, not his infant son or his three year old daughter.  He’d found one family that seemed to match—the age and description of the woman and her two children—but the woman’s man had been interred with her.

It had taken a while for that to sink in.  For a while, he’d wondered if his grief had cost him his sanity.  How could he grieve for the loss of his family and forget where he’d come from, though?  If he was right and this was his colony, how was it possible that neither his woman nor his children had ever existed at all—not as his?  How could he feel such a devastating sense of loss for something that had never happened anywhere but in his mind? 

And if all of that was true and they were nothing but a figment of an insane mind, who the fuck was he?  Where had he come from?  Had he already been mad before he’d woken in the company med center?   Had the company made a mistake and patched his broken mind with the wrong man’s memories?  Or had they, for some reason that defied logic or explanation, given him memories they knew weren’t his?  Did that explain why they’d worked so hard to keep him from discovering it? 

But why torment him with such a terrible past that he’d felt at times that he couldn’t live and bear it?

How could his parents not have existed?

How could Simon exist—a Cyborg, an identical twin?

He thought, if he hadn’t already been questioning what the company had done to him, the shock of coming face to face with Simon might’ve completely unhinged his mind.  As it was, it had still been a hell of a fucking jolt, but he’d stopped doubting his own sanity by then and begun trying to formulate some way to take a closer look at the company. 

Simon hadn’t been just one more clue, though.  Simon had been the jackpot. 

Simon had known who at the company was responsible—the woman he thought of as Mother LaMotte, Dr. Carol LaMotte.

Almost as if his thoughts had conjured him, Simon strolled into the great room at that moment, still dripping water from his shower.  Seth turned and surveyed him with more than a little irritation. 

Both Simon and Cole seemed enthralled with the doctor’s decadent shower, he thought wryly, wondering if it was because both Cyborgs were so fascinated with the changes they sensed in themselves and enjoyed the way the water felt pelting them.

They’d assured him that they were evolving, just as the rumors had said about the other rogues, that they had awareness, felt things they’d never experienced before.

He wasn’t sure he believed that either.

He didn’t know what the fuck to believe anymore.

“There is still hot water,” Simon said after studying Seth’s expression for several moments as if trying to interpret his thoughts or, more likely, the emotions.

Seth shook his head, moving from the window.  “I don’t need a shower,” he said irritably.

“The hot water soothes tension.”

Seth tamped the urge to ask him what the hell he’d know about tension.  He was a fucking machine.  “Why the fuck not?” he muttered.  “At least it’s something to do to pass the time.”

“Cole is not likely to return before dawn,” Simon pointed out coolly as Seth stalked past him.  “… If he returns at all.”

“It doesn’t look like the doctor is likely to return either.”

The shower was soothing, as much as he hated to admit it.  He wondered if that was why the doctor had decided to take the place—because it had the old fashioned water shower rather than the particle showers required by law now.  For that matter, he was surprised she’d wrangled permission to keep it.

Unless, of course, nobody knew she had it. 

It was possible.  She had enough clout, or she was smart enough, she’d managed to virtually erase her trail.

It had taken determination to track her down.

* * * *

Clair was still so angry when she reached her mother’s house that the grief that had nearly overwhelmed every waking moment since her mother’s death barely caused her a pang as she stopped at the gate to key in the security code.  She’d dreaded the task of wrapping up her mother’s affairs, of sorting her mother’s belongings, and trying to decide what to do with her personal affects and the home they’d shared for most of her childhood.  She’d put it off as long as she felt like she could before she’d dredged up the inner strength to face it.

Only to be met with the discovery that those bastards at Robotics, Inc., where her mother had slaved for more than thirty years, thought they were entitled to all her mother’s worldly possessions! 

She didn’t give a damn if they were laboring under the impression that her mother had no next of kin!  She still didn’t know how they could have failed know it when her mother had worked for them so long, but … fuck their damned clause! 

It was an outrage that they’d had the gall even to put such a damned clause in their contracts!  It wasn’t enough that they’d profited from her mother’s brilliant mind for more than thirty years, claimed everything she’d ever discovered or invented?  They thought they could take everything she’d accumulated over the years and put it back into their pocket, too?

The slimy bastards!

A vague sense of satisfaction wafted through her as the gates opened to allow her into the compound.  The look on their faces had been priceless when the judge had examined her documentation and informed them that she was her mother’s sole beneficiary!

Take that, you slimy, money grubbing sons-of-a-bitch!

Maybe the house still belonged to the company—they were going to have to prove that in court, though.  She’d fight them every step of the way if it took every credit she had to her name, but everything else, everything inside the house and outside of the house, was hers, by damn!  If it wasn’t part of the property, had been purchased by her mother, then it certainly wasn’t theirs.

She had a good mind to dig up her mother’s rose garden while she was at it.  Her mother had bought them and planted them!

Shutting off her hover-car, she barely waited for it to settle to the ground in front of the door before she shoved the door open and got out.  She paused when she had, though, trying to take a few calming breaths.

Her throat closed as she stared at the house, her anger dying to a slow simmer. 

She couldn’t believe her mother was gone.

There was no way she was ever going to be able accept that her mother had taken her own life.  It just wasn’t possible.  She would’ve known if her mother had been depressed enough to have such thoughts.  She knew she would have!

Thrusting those thoughts aside, she strode purposefully to the front door and keyed in the security code.  The door opened. 

The lights didn’t come on when she stepped across the threshold.  “Lights!”

Frowning when nothing happened, she stepped back to the wall and skimmed her hand along the surface until she finally found the manual switch.  Relief filled her when the lights flickered on.

She’d more than half-suspected the bastards had had the power turned off just for spite.

Puzzled, she glanced around the living room, but she couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary.  She hadn’t realized that she was listening to the house until she heard, faintly, the sound of running water.

Her heart bounced into her throat and tried to strangle her.  Her mind went chaotic.  The sound connected in her mind, though, to her mother’s pride and joy—the ‘natural’ shower she loved.  Without stopping to think that it couldn’t possibly be her mother, Clair closed the door and headed toward her mother’s room … rushed, a mixture of excitement and dread pounding through her. 

It wasn’t until she’d stepped into her mother’s room that the truth hit her.  Her mother was dead.  She knew her mother was dead.  She’d had to identify and claim her body from the morgue.

She froze then, her mind more chaotic than before.

The next thought that leapt into her mind was her confrontation with the CEO of Robotics, Inc.  It didn’t take a great leap from there to reach the conclusion that the bastards had counted on the house being theirs.

At the sound of the water being shut off, Clair glanced quickly around for something to use as a weapon.  Retreat didn’t occur to her until she saw there was nothing remotely weapon-like that she could see, but by then she’d heard the shower door open and the splat of bare, wet feet across the tiles of the bathroom.  Shoving her hand into the pocket of her jacket as she heard the steps pause on the other side of the door, she pointed her index finger at the intruder, hoping against hope that it looked enough like the barrel of a pistol to at least give him pause.

The door opened.  She hadn’t expected it to be anyone she knew so it was no great surprise to come face to face—well, actually chest—with a man she’d never seen in her life.  Beyond that nothing was as she’d expected.  He was naked, or the next thing to it, wearing nothing but a thin towel—two corners fisted in one hand at his waist—wrapped around his narrow hips that didn’t even make a complete connection, displaying a long, muscular, hairy thigh.  His torso was proportionally as long as the legs, his chest broad, sculpted with muscles and sprinkled with a dusting of dark hair that was slicked to his skin with water.  Long black hair clung close to his head and around his broad shoulders.  The face above didn’t even penetrate her perceptions beyond a vague impression of being hard and angular, the two almost straight black brows above his eyes pulled into a scowl. 

The overall impression of a wall of flesh—he was a very large man—rocked her back on her heels, mentally speaking, and completed her mind’s descent into chaos that fear had started.  “Put your hands up!” Clair demanded when she finally found her voice.

Something flickered in his deep blue eyes.  A faint smile tipped one corner of his hard mouth up.  Slowly, he released his hold on the towel and lifted his arms.

The moment he did, his towel hit the floor.

Clair’s gaze automatically followed the flutter of white and then ricocheted upward to the behemoth the towel had been covering and hung there.  Her jaw went slack.  A blur of movement registered in her mind, however, as an attempt to relieve her of her ‘weapon’, and she whirled instinctively to run.

A jolt went through her when she found herself facing a wall of flesh that so closely mirrored the mountain of a man now behind her that she thought, for too many seconds, that she actually had encountered a mirror. 

His hand shot out before she could do more than gape at him.  He caught her index finger in an unbreakable grip before she could even instinctively snatch it away.  Two hands settled on her waist from behind.  Her flight instinct kicked in once more.  For the space of a few hundred thundering heart beats, Clair executed the ‘cornered feline’ escape maneuver.  She became a blur of twisting, jerking, flailing movement, evading a firm grip on her by either man, but she discovered in the end that they’d still managed to cage her so effectively between their bodies that no amount of wiggling or jerking could free her.

That conclusion wasn’t what made her stop abruptly.  It wasn’t even the fact that she’d run out of breath from hyperventilation.  It was the sudden realization that the meaty thuds banging against her, back and front, wasn’t their thighs.  It was something long, cylindrical, and it was getting hard.

Panting for breath, she gaped upwards at the man still holding her finger for a moment before fear sent a shaft of reviving anger through her.  “Don’t even think about using those things on me!”

The man in front of her cocked his head to one side curiously.  “I have no weapon—and neither do you.”

The man behind her speared the cleft of her buttocks with his ‘weapon’, poking her several times pointedly. “What?  This?”

When she whipped her head around to gape at him, she saw his eyes were gleaming with both humor and anger, his hard mouth twisted in a grim smile.  “You aren’t Dr. LaMotte, so why don’t you tell us who you are?”

A flicker of resentment filtered through Clair’s shock.  It was her mother’s house—her home, really!  The nerve of the bastard asking her what she was doing there when he was the intruder!  That realization gave her pause, but her thoughts and emotions were seesawing so drastically from one thought and impression to the next that a sense of caution was no more dominant than anything else.  In point of fact, the resentment, compounded by the anger that had seethed in her from well before her arrival at her mother’s home, shifted to the forefront when it might not have otherwise.

She was dimly aware that a sense of self-preservation should’ve overruled all other considerations, but her emotional distress wreaked havoc with good sense.  “I’m not the intruder here!  You are!  So why don’t you tell me what the hell you two are doing in my mother’s house?”

The two men exchanged a look that Clair could only categorize as startled even though there was little evidence of it in their expressions.  Before the sense of satisfaction that flickered to life could really buoy her self-righteous anger, however, the man in front of her knocked the wind from her sails. 

“You are not,” he said flatly.

Clair gaped up at him.  Indignation flashed through her.  “Excuse you!” she snapped.  “I most certainly am!”

“Dr. LaMotte doesn’t have a daughter,” the man behind her responded coolly, the inflection in his voice accusing.

His calm assertion knocked her off kilter again, but she twisted her head to glare up at him.  “This is … unbelievable!  You two break into my mother’s house and you have the gall to act like I’m the one in the wrong here!”  She tried to squeeze from between them.  “We’ll just call the cops and let them sort this out!”

The hands at her waist tightened, preventing her attempt to escape.  “We’ll sort it out alright,” the man responded with grim agreement, “but we don’t need the cops.”

Before Clair could entirely assimilate what was happening, the man behind her shifted his grip from her waist to one arm and walked her into the living area, applying just enough force that she had to walk or fall on her face and then giving her just enough of a push toward the chair that she overbalanced and plopped into the seat.  She gaped up at his grim face with a mixture of uneasiness and indignation.  The only reasonable explanation for their presence that presented itself was that they were from the company.  She wasn’t entirely satisfied with that idea since that didn’t explain what the two of them were doing strolling around her mother’s house naked, but she couldn’t think of anything else that even came close. 

If they were burglars, surely they wouldn’t have taken the time to make use of her mother’s bath?  In any case, she hadn’t seen any sign at all that there had been a search for valuables.  She’d look for signs when the light had failed to come on automatically as it should have.

To her partial relief, as soon as she’d settled in the chair the man who’d escorted her strode back toward the bathroom, returning a few moments later wearing a pair of trousers.  He hadn’t bothered to fasten them completely or to don a shirt, but she felt less vulnerable, for no reason that she could readily identify, by the fact that he’d ‘holstered his weapon’.  His twin, who’d stood guard over her for the few moments the other was out of the room, disappeared and returned wearing trousers, as well.

“Who are you?” she demanded. 

The two men exchanged a long look.  Finally, they almost seemed to shrug.  She didn’t know why that made her belly clench, but it did. 

“I’m Seth.  He’s Simon.  And you are?”

Clair’s lips tightened.  “Tired of this bullshit!”

Seth dropped to a crouch in front of her the moment she tried to rise, planting a hand the size of a serving plate in the middle of her belly and effectively pinning her to her chair.  “Not nearly as tired as you’re going to be,” he said grimly.

Clair eyed him with a mixture of growing uneasiness and irritation.  “Maybe you didn’t get the memo from your boss?” she said with a little less bravado.  “The judge awarded me my mother’s estate, damn it!  Now … get the hell out of my mother’s house or I will call the cops!”

Chapter Two

Slowly but surely the self-righteous anger that had sustained Clair died an unhappy death as she surreptitiously studied the two men who’d withdrawn a short distance from her to discuss the information she’d unloaded on them.  She couldn’t help but think that they’d been way more disturbed by the news of her mother’s death than it seemed they would be if, as she’d supposed, they worked for the company. 

They wouldn’t have a personal reason to be disturbed by the news if they worked for the company, though—would they?

Not that she was entirely sure that the one named Simon was disturbed.  Something had definitely flickered in his eyes when she’d informed them that she’d just come from court and had been awarded her mother’s estate because her mother was deceased, but no emotion that she could discern had crossed his handsome face. 

Seth was another matter.  He’d tried to shield his thoughts from her, had succeeded to a degree, and yet his swarthy complexion had paled just enough to give away the fact that he’d been both shocked and dismayed by the news. 

They were currently debating whether or not to believe her.  She’d only caught a couple of words here and there, but it was enough to suggest that as the topic. 

She just couldn’t figure out why it seemed to disturb them. 

If they were burglars, it certainly shouldn’t have.  Unfortunately, she’d already blurted the news before it had occurred to her just how dangerous that information could be if they were burglars intent on robbing her mother.  Almost the moment it dawned on her that it was a very bad idea to inform them they needn’t worry about being disturbed, though, she’d realized the news hadn’t come as a pleasant surprise to either of them.

That just didn’t make any sense, though.  If they worked for the company, had been sent by the company to pack up her belongings, why would they care at all?  And why wouldn’t they have already known?

She didn’t know enough to figure it out.  They hadn’t told her a damned thing beyond their names!

She glanced toward the door, wondering, since they seemed to have dismissed her, if she might have a chance of reaching it and getting to her car before they could stop her.

“Not a chance in hell.”

Clair sent Seth a startled look, uncertain of whether she was more unnerved by the fact that he seemed to instantly discern the thoughts running through her head or the discovery that he was watching her a lot more closely than she’d realized.  She struggled to look both surprised and baffled by his comment.  A gleam, almost of amusement, entered his eyes.  His expression, however, was one of sardonic skepticism.  She frowned at him a little resentfully.  “If you don’t mind, I need to go to the bathroom.”

She’d only made the comment to try to convince him she hadn’t been considering the possibility of eluding them, but the moment she did inspiration struck her.  She struggled to tamp the surge of hope that sent her heart into overdrive while she waited for his reaction.  She didn’t entirely like the look in his eyes, but when he merely nodded, she got up and headed toward her mother’s bathroom.  “I believe I’ll take a bath,” she threw over her shoulder with an attempt at casualness, hoping her voice wasn’t as shaky as her knees.  

She didn’t glance back to gauge their reaction to the comment, but she relaxed fractionally when neither man challenged the remark.  Her knees nearly buckled with weakness when she secured the bathroom door behind her.  Her heart was palpitating so frantically by now that she felt downright faint. 

She discovered she did need to go, but she couldn’t decide if it was because she really had the need or it was nerves tying her innards in knots that made her feel as if she had to.  Regardless, she couldn’t afford to spare the time.  They’d no doubt be timing her.

“Shower on!” she said shakily.  “Hot!”

Pushing away from the door the moment water burst from the showerhead to muffle, she hoped, the sounds of her escape, she rushed to the toilet and climbed up on the seat to reach the tiny window above it. 

They wouldn’t know the window would open, or expect it.  Besides, it probably wouldn’t occur to them that it was big enough for her to climb out when it looked so impossibly small.  She knew from past experience, however, that it would open and that she could squeeze through.  She’d sneaked out of it once to join her friends for a clandestine, ‘not parentally approved’ jaunt. 

She’d been grounded for weeks for that little fit of rebellion, she reflected, feeling the discomfiting mixture of emotions from her past resurrect themselves, the resentment and the sick sense of doom at being caught.  Hard upon the heels of that, she felt a pang of loss again. 

Her mother wasn’t around to ‘run her life’ now.  She never would be again.

Shaking the thought off, she felt for the manual catch on the window.  She’d just twisted it and shoved the window outward when a heavy hand banged on the door with such startling suddenness that she jumped all over and almost fell into the toilet bowl.  Her heart leapt into her throat, nearly choking her.  She hadn’t realized how damned slippery the seat still was with condensation from Seth’s shower. “What?” she demanded, anger grating in her voice.  “I’m busy in here!”

“Make it quick!”

Clair ground her teeth together.  “Exactly how do you think I can manage that with you standing on the other side of the door, listening?  Anyway, I want to take a shower.”

“Shower later.  We need to talk.”

There was enough grim determination in his voice that Clair knew he wasn’t going to wait for her to take a shower.  Would it be better to try for escape now?  Or wait until she’d lulled his suspicions? 

Or maybe wait for him to strangle her? 

She hadn’t allowed herself to openly consider that they might have an agenda that could include death and possible torture and dismemberment for her, but she realized it had been circling the back of her mind.  “Just a minute!” she hedged, abruptly hoisting herself onto the windowsill.

Blinded by the light inside the bathroom, it wasn’t until she slammed face first into something meaty hard as she went headfirst through the opening that she realized there was more than shadows outside the window. 

“I have her,” Simon said calmly, hoisting her more comfortably—for him—on the hard ridge of his shoulder, locking an arm like a steal band around her, and dragging her the remainder of the way through the window opening.

Clair was too shocked to fully digest what had happened for several moments.  By the time it sank into her mind that Simon had been waiting for her beneath the damned window, he’d strode around the house to the patio doors and through them into the living room she’d so lately left.  He dropped her into the chair.

The blood that had pooled in her head during the trek around the house, receded along with the darkness and pinpoints of light.  Seth and Simon swam into focus.  Simon was still standing over her, his massive arms crossed over his equally massive chest, his feet planted in a wide-legged stance.  Seth had sprawled in the chair across from her.  He was eyeing her with a mixture of amusement and irritation—which was how she identified him—his expression.

Simon’s face was still unnervingly impassive.  Otherwise, the two men looked like matched bookends—well, except for the fact that Simon’s hair was a bit longer than Seth’s.  She hadn’t noticed that before.

“I nearly fell out that window myself the first time I used the shower.  Good thing Simon thought about the hazard, huh?” Seth murmured sardonically.

Clair smiled at the two men a little weakly, trying to think of something to say that they might swallow that didn’t entail an admission that she’d been trying to escape.  “I heard something outside.”

Simon tilted his head curiously.  “You did not hear me,” he said flatly.

She glared at him.  “Actually, I did,” she said belligerently.  “That’s why I opened the window to look out.”

For the first time emotion creased his features.  His nearly straight black brows tented above the straight bridge of his nose in a look that was clearly bafflement.  He turned to look at Seth questioningly.  Seth’s lips flattened with irritation.  He shook his head slightly.  “She’s lying.”

For some reason she couldn’t entirely fathom, Simon’s obvious confusion caused her a pang almost of guilt.  Seth’s comment effectively distracted her.  “Exactly how do you figure that?” she demanded.

“He’s a trained soldier—and he’s damned good.  You wouldn’t have heard him.”

Surprise flickered through Clair.  She glanced at Simon again, realizing abruptly that that explained his unnerving demeanor—military discipline.  No wonder he’d seemed so emotionless over the entire situation!

It was almost a relief, but it was more confusing.  “But … he works for the company?  You both do.  Right?”

She could see that Seth was considering whether or not to answer her question but apparently he decided against it.  “Why don’t you tell us what happened to your mother and why it is that there doesn’t seem to be any record of your existence?”

Clair had been fairly successful in avoiding thinking about her mother up to that point.  The question abruptly brought her grief down upon her like an avalanche.  She felt her throat close with sorrow, felt the sting of tears in her eyes and nose.  She sniffed, trying to summon anger to beat back the urge to break down.  “Why don’t you tell me what happened to my mother!  Because I don’t for one damned minute believe she killed herself!”

For a split second, she thought she detected sympathy in Seth’s eyes but it vanished so quickly she wasn’t certain in the next moment.  He shoved to his feet in an angry, jerky movement.  “She’s dead,” he said, an odd mixture of anger and defeat in his voice. 

It was almost as if, despite the fact that she’d already told him she’d inherited her mother’s estate, that he’d simply refused to believe she was actually dead until he’d seen her grief over it.  Clair watched him in surprise as he strode quickly toward the window and shoved the curtains aside to stare out at the night, his stance rigid.  She swallowed several times with an effort and finally managed to dislodge the hard knot in her throat.  “She’s dead.”

“Gods damn it!” he growled abruptly, slamming his balled fist against the side of the window so hard it dented the plasti-metal framing. 

A shockwave, both from his furious outburst and the stunning results of his actions, effectively and abruptly shut down the grief that had been threatening to spill out.  Clair gaped at the fist-sized pit he’d driven into the virtually indestructible material.

She continued to focus on it in utter disbelief until he strode back toward her, effectively blocking her view and filling her vision with his form.  Her gaze flickered to his hand.  Without surprise, she saw that the flesh had split and his hand was bleeding and yet there was no sign of broken, splintered bones.

“Who are you?” he growled.

When she merely gaped at him, he dropped to a crouch and grasped her shoulders, giving her a shake hard enough to rock her head on her shoulders and jerk her out of her shock.  She felt her face crumple.  “I’m her daughter!  I told you!” she said tearfully.

“You can’t be!  She didn’t have a daughter,” he growled. 

“She did!  I can prove it!  I have the records on my book in my purse!”

Rising as abruptly as he’d knelt in front of her, he scanned the room.  When his gaze zeroed in on the purse she’d set down on the table near the door, he strode toward it and snatched it up.  Watching him, Clair rubbed her shoulders absently where he’d gripped her.  They throbbed from his bruising grip. 

“He hurt you?”

Clair glanced from Seth to Simon in surprise.  She hadn’t noticed any particular inflection in his voice and she didn’t see anything in his expression that she could interpret as sympathy.  She lifted her chin at him.  “No,” she lied.  Not that it was anything significant anyway.  She was far more unnerved by the barely leashed violence in him than she was hurt. 

Ignoring her disclaimer, he grasped her sleeve, ripped it from wrist to shoulder and examined her bruised shoulder.  Clair was so stunned that he’d torn her sleeve as if it was tissue paper, he’d examined her shoulder and turned to glare at his brother before she even realized what his intent had been.  “She is bruised.”

Seth glanced at him sharply, flicked a look at her and then back at Simon.  “She’ll live.  When did you get to be so squeamish?” he muttered, returning his attention to the book he’d pulled from her purse and scanning the documents he’d pulled up. 

“You are saying I cannot feel squeamish?” Simon demanded, his voice dropping to an ominous growl.

Seth flicked an annoyed look at him, shook his head fractionally, and glanced at Clair significantly.  Clair frowned, trying to figure out what that look and comment hinted at.  Uneasiness flickered through her when she discovered that both men were studying her speculatively.

“You had this forged.”

At the flat accusation, Clair gaped at Seth for a moment before indignation rose within her breast.  “The judge checked it!  It’s all in order, damn it!  And I’ll have you know I don’t associate with the kind of people that could forge something like that!”

Her anger, or her assertion that she didn’t associate with thugs, apparently amused him.  Some of the grimness left his features and a flicker of something she couldn’t entirely identify shown in his eyes briefly. 

She was sorry she’d noticed.  The man had far more physical appeal than she was sure he deserved.  Not that he’d been brutal, but he was clearly dangerous and she didn’t even want to think about what he was capable of.  Ditto his twin, who almost seemed more dangerous because he contained his emotions so well. 

She was daft even to allow the thought to flicker through her mind briefly that they were the most spectacular males she’d seen in forever.

Actually, ever, she mentally amended … grudgingly.  The face—more attractive than really handsome—was still well above par.  She thought they would’ve been extremely attractive even if they hadn’t been built so well, but there was no getting around the fact that both men were built beautifully and the overall package was so appealing it blew every other man she’d met completely away.

His eyes—their eyes—were their best asset by far.  The color, almost a deep sapphire blue, was both rare and beautiful and the long, sweeping black lashes that set them off only emphasized their beauty.  The slash of black eyebrows—angry eyebrows—kept them from looking the least bit girlish.  At the same time, the sharp contrast almost made their eyes more appealing.

The image of Simon’s brows tented above the bridge of his nose in confusion flickered in her mind and she realized she’d thought it was … cute—both the ‘puppy dog’ look and the confusion she’d seen in his eyes.

She gave herself a mental smack. 

She needed her head examined!

They were about as cute as crocodiles and probably just as cold-blooded!

“How does it come about that you have records that don’t appear anywhere else?” Seth asked more mildly, returning to the chair across from her and sprawling in it. 

Clair felt her cheeks heat, both because it occurred to her that either or both of them might have noticed her completely insane interest in them on a sexual level and because that particular question struck a sore spot.  “I don’t know,” she muttered, squirming a little uncomfortably.

Seth’s gaze, she noticed when she met his eyes again, was both skeptical and assessing.  “But you have a suspicion?”

Clair shrugged irritably.  “I don’t honestly know.  I haven’t … been home for a while.”

He lifted his black brows questioningly, silently commanding her to elaborate.  Clair bounced out of her chair angrily and paced to the window where Seth had stood before.  “We didn’t get along that well, ok?”

“How long?”

Clair’s lips tightened.  She wasn’t sure herself why she was so reluctant to tell him anything … except that it was personal.  It was none of his damned business! 

“How long?”

Clair whirled to glare at him, shrugging somewhat petulantly.  “I don’t know … five or six years, I guess.”  She set her chin when his eyes narrowed, but reluctance was only part of it and not even the biggest part of it.  It hurt, and she didn’t want to talk to a stranger about it.  “She sent me away … to a girl’s school.”

“Why?”

“None of your damned business!  That’s why!  It doesn’t change the fact that I’m her daughter!  Why are you here?  What is it that you want?”

“What do you know about your mother’s work?” Seth asked after a prolonged silence that made Clair feel like squirming, made her feel exposed, as if he could see right through her anger and knew it was guilt that had spawned it. 

Her defensiveness, she realized, was telling enough.  Maybe she’d kept the dirty little details to herself, but she could tell he had his suspicions.  His imagination might well be worse than the truth, but she still wasn’t going to tell him. 

Not for the first time since she’d discovered—on the news of all the horrible things—that her mother was dead, she wondered why her mother had erased her so completely from her life.  Because that was what she’d done.  She hadn’t merely sent her away to school.  Except for the occasional visits home since then—the very few visits—and a meager handful of holo-visits, she’d barely seen her mother since she was little more than a child. 

She’d tried to tell herself that it wasn’t really her fault, that her mother was just too consumed with her work to be ‘bothered’ with her, but it was hard to convince herself of it when she’d been banished for that one little infraction and then … erased as if she’d never existed. 

Her mother had hated her because she wasn’t perfect, she thought glumly. 

Or maybe hate was too strong a word?  Maybe the brilliant Dr. LaMotte just hadn’t been able to face the fact that her daughter was so ordinary?  Maybe her mother had just thought of her in the light of a ‘failed experiment’ and simply decided to put ‘it’ from her mind?

She cleared her throat of the wedge of emotion that collected there.  Crossing the room again, she wilted tiredly into the ‘inquisition’ chair.  “I honestly don’t know anything about her work,” she responded finally.  “She worked for Robotics, Inc.  That’s pretty much all I know beyond the fact that she had degrees in psychology, artificial intelligence, and nano technology.  I suppose whatever she was doing had to do with one or all of those things, but I don’t know.  She hardly ever talked about her work … not to me, anyway.”

She studied the two men for several moments, waiting for some kind of reaction.  “Look!  If you’re worried about me disclosing any sort of secret company information, you needn’t.  I wouldn’t if I knew anything—I don’t particularly want to get sued—and I don’t know.  Hell!  I wouldn’t understand it if she’d tried to explain it to me.  I’m not a scientist!”

Seth studied Clair’s face, searching for some sign that she was lying, struggling against the crushing sense of defeat that had been threatening to overwhelm him since he’d begun questioning her.  He hadn’t realized how thoroughly he’d convinced himself that he would at last have the answers he’d sought for so long until he was faced with the reality that he wasn’t likely ever to have them.  Fury rapidly replaced the sense of desolation, disappointment, and frustration.  The urge to target her with it was so strong that he felt physically sick to his stomach. 

Surging from the chair before he could do or say something he knew he would deeply regret, he paced to the window, struggling to preserve the appearance of calm reflection when, inside, he felt as if he was drowning in the fierce, chaotic emotions roiling through him.  A procession of images paraded through his mind of all the dangers they’d faced and overcome just to reach her—the woman they’d come to think of as the mother of the Cyborg race—Dr. Carol LaMotte. 

Simon and Cole had, he mentally amended, talking of her as if she was a combination of mother and goddess.  He supposed their perception of her had begun to infect him, as well, because he realized it wasn’t just the fact that he realized he wasn’t going to get the answers he wanted that made him feel … lost.  He felt as if he’d been deprived of something infinitely more precious. 

He felt the same sick sense of loss that swept over him each time he’d allowed his ‘memories’ to overcome him and thought of those he’d loved and lost. 

Not real, he told himself angrily.  None of it was and he hadn’t lost anything more than an opportunity to find answers to questions he realized he already knew.  Nothing he believed about himself was real.  None of it had ever happened, however painful and horrible the images were in his mind.  He hadn’t loved a beautiful dark haired girl named Becky, hadn’t made love to her in the bed they’d shared together, argued with her, laughed with her … held her in his arms while she breathed her last.  He hadn’t cuddled his babies, changed their soiled diapers, fed them, guided their first steps—watched them blown to bits in a Cyborg raid on his colony. 

He couldn’t erase the horror by having Carol LaMotte answer his questions.

But he realized he had pinned his hopes on the possibility that she could, somehow, take away the pain she’d given him to live with or, at the very least, explain to him why she’d given him hell when she could just as easily have given him another life altogether.

Why?

To make him hate Cyborgs so that he’d be a better Hunter? 

Why, gods damn it to hell? 

He’d never gotten particularly close to any of the other Hunters, and yet he knew a good bit about their own ‘pasts’.  To a degree, they all had tragedies to deal with, maybe because the makers had considered that a fundamental part of life, because they had to experience ‘bad’ to understand and appreciate ‘good’.  Carol, according to Clair, had been a psychologist.  Maybe she’d had something to do with the decision, maybe a lot.

Maybe she’d just been a sick bitch that got her jollies off of torturing the minds of the beings she’d helped to create?

And what was he?  A being?  Or just a fucking machine programmed to believe he was real?

“Do you believe that what she has spoken is the truth?”

Seth sent Simon a sharp look, more because he resented the intrusion into his thoughts than because he thought Simon was questioning his judgment.  The diversion from his thoughts pushed some of the roiling chaos back, though, forced him to regain a modicum of control and compartmentalize the emotions he was having so much difficulty dealing with. 

It was a good thing, a small portion of relief.  Short of venting, which he was afraid to do, forcing him to turn his mind to other things was likely the only relief in sight.

He wanted to unleash the emotions.  Keeping them bottled inside made him feel as if he would explode.  On the other hand, he wasn’t certain he could stop short of destroying everything in his path if he let go of his control.  “She’s holding something back,” he responded finally.  “I don’t know what, but I don’t think she’s lying.”

Simon nodded, turning to study Clair through narrowed, assessing eyes.  “You think that she is Mother’s true biological offspring?  Or that she is one of us?”

A wave of shock went through him and Seth whipped his head around to study Clair himself.  The possibility hadn’t even once occurred to him.  He’d thought, at first, that the tale she’d spun had to be a lie, but he hadn’t considered that it might be the truth as she knew it and still be a lie.

He narrowed his eyes, considering.  “There’s one way to be absolutely certain,” he said with finality. 

Returning to Clair, he held out his hand commandingly.  She studied it doubtfully for a long moment and finally responded to the gesture, lifting her own hand and placing it in his.  When she did, he pulled her to her feet and swept her up into his arms in the same motion. 

It was like lifting air.  The moment her warmth and weight settled against him, he knew, absolutely, that she was human, a fragile compilation of bone and tissue.  As he stared into her wide, startled eyes, however, he forgot that his only intent had been to weigh her to determine if she was bone and flesh or steel wrapped in biological material.  He forgot that he wasn’t really a man at all.  The woman in his arms made him aware of his manhood in a way he couldn’t recall ever being before.  Heated desire scoured him, usurping the ravaging emotions with want of a magnitude equal or surpassing the nearly overwhelming emotions of before. 

He registered a stinging awareness of the press of her softness against him—the silky touch of her hands on his shoulders, the yielding flesh of hip and breast against his own chest and belly.  His mouth went dry as dust as he dragged his gaze from hers and explored her face—so close to his own now that he could discern a pale sprinkling of freckles along the narrow bridge of her nose and her high cheekbones, her small, thin lipped ‘no nonsense’ mouth and the knob of her belligerent chin. 

Those outward signs of determination had been amply supported by her challenging demeanor, and yet she was too small and fragile to back up that bravado, regardless of what she apparently believed—certainly against him … or Simon.

He realized she was just as aware of her vulnerability as he was when he met her gaze again.  As hard as she was trying to hide it, the paleness of her skin gave her away.  Doubt was evident in her gaze, and yet he saw her eyes had darkened, that she felt as drawn to him as he did to her.  She was waging a similar battle between desire and common sense. 

Not that there’d been much of a war between his desires and logic … until he realized she was as afraid of him as she was attracted to him.

With good reason.  He’d restrained himself, but barely.  She’d seen the brooding menace he was trying to control.  It was enough to make her wary—anyone of any intelligence—and she was. 

He felt his cheeks heat with discomfort.  He could see in her eyes that she was well aware of the carnal thoughts that had been steaming his brain.  Beyond that, he hadn’t thought further than picking her up to determine if she was Cyborg or human, hadn’t considered the awkwardness of it.  If he simply plunked her down again, she’d think he was mad on top of perceiving him as a brute with little self-control. 

Inspired by the need to preserve at least a modicum of dignity, he turned with her and strode into her mother’s room, dropping her unceremoniously on the bed.  “Stay put,” he growled.  Scowling at the blank look of shock and dawning fear on her face and turning away, he headed toward the door again. 

“You aren’t leaving?” she demanded, finding her voice as he reached the door.

“No.  And neither are you.”

Chapter Three

“What was that about?” Simon growled challengingly as Seth joined him in the living area again.

Seth felt himself bristle at the challenge in Simon’s voice.  He struggled with it a moment and finally managed to tamp it—somewhat.  “You wanted to know if she was human.  She is.”

Clearly not appeased by the explanation, Simon continued to scowl at him.  He ignored it, sprawling tiredly on the couch as the adrenaline rush of mixed emotions began to drain away, leaving him feeling empty and at the same time restless.

He didn’t have to look far for the source of the restlessness.  His cock hadn’t completely settled.  He resisted the urge to adjust himself, deciding to ignore the discomfort rather than draw Simon’s attention to his half aroused state.

For all the good it did.  The bastard didn’t miss much.

“That was no more than an excuse to do what you wanted to do.”

And to think he’d felt deprived having no brother to grow up with!  “They somehow work it out to give you mind reading abilities?” Seth murmured laconically.

A muscle worked in Simon’s jaw, a clear sign he was a good bit angrier than he’d let on.  “I do not have to.”

Seth turned his head to study his twin.  “It’s generally a mistake to think others are motivated by the same thing you are … or have the same thoughts.  You aren’t me, regardless of what you look like.”

Simon’s eyes narrowed.  “I know what a hard cock indicates … and you look like me, not the other way around.  I was created first.”

Seth ground his teeth, but decided to ignore the provocation.  There was no point in arguing with Simon, particularly when he was right … on both counts.  Not that he’d realized it himself until he’d picked her up.  “I didn’t come all this way, risk my life, just to get a piece of ass … even if it is a pretty piece of ass,” he growled.  “I came to find answers.”

“Tell that to someone who does not know you as I do.”

Seth surged to his feet.  “You don’t know me!” 

Simon studied him coolly.  It was one of the things that made it hard to hold on to his own temper—the fact that Simon could so thoroughly rile him and remain completely aloof.  It made him want to punch the bastard in the face. 

“Then you will not mind if I offer to pleasure her?”

The question threw Seth off balance.  For a moment a sense of possessiveness warred with his sense of humor, but the amusement won out as he pictured the look on Clair’s face.  He turned away before Simon could catch a glimpse of the laugh threatening to spill out.  “Suit yourself,” he muttered. 

A barely discernible noise filled the silence that fell between them then, a faint grating sound as of plasti-metal sliding against plasti-metal.  Seth threw a glance at Simon and then toward the hall that led to the room where they’d left Clair.  Two possibilities instantly leapt to mind.  Either she was in the process of building a barricade at the door or she’d figured out how to get the window open in Dr. LaMotte’s room.

Simon charged toward the bedroom before he could say anything.  Seth followed him, arriving just in time to see Clair’s rump disappearing over the windowsill.  Simon, who’d already reached the window, caught her by her ankles and hauled her back through the opening.  She caught the sill as she was dragged back in, clinging to it determinedly for a split second before Simon broke her grip on it.  He held her free of the floor by her ankles, obviously momentarily baffled over how to put her down without hurting her since she was hanging head downward. 

Clair, clearly nonplussed for a handful of seconds, recovered before Simon did.  Uttering high pitched growling noises, she swung her fists at him, landing a half a dozen blows along his calves, knees, and thighs.

Simon lowered her to the floor, releasing her ankles once her back had settled.  Clair bounded to her feet, stared at Seth, standing between her and the door to the room, and then whirled on Simon, obviously intent on fighting her way out since she’d been balked of the possibility of flight.  Simon merely stared down at her in bemusement as she boxed his belly and ribs. 

“You will hurt yourself,” he said finally, grabbing her wrists at about the same time she began to slow from weariness. 

She renewed her efforts then, jerking at her wrists in an attempt to break free.

Simon released her but jerked her up against his length before she could resume the attack.  Seth was as surprised as Clair was when he followed by jerking her upward and planting his mouth firmly over hers. 

And no better pleased.

He could see the shock roll through her.  She went perfectly still for a moment and then began shoving at him, trying to push him away.  Just as Seth was considering whether to interfere or not, she ceased to struggle and went perfectly limp.

Playing possum?

Seth was inclined to think so, but Simon clearly didn’t grasp the signals.  He continued to kiss her with a thoroughness that aroused a mixture of irritation and desire in Seth.  When he finally released her, she swayed dizzily.

Simon was breathing like a racehorse at the end of a six-lap race, his face flushed, his eyes glazed.  “I will pleasure you if you will allow it,” he murmured somewhat hoarsely.  “I desire you.”

The offer brought Clair out of her semi-stupor.  She balled a fist up and slammed it against his chest.  “You asshole!  I don’t think so!”

Seth didn’t find the fireworks nearly as amusing as he’d expected to.  Then again, he wasn’t in any position to enjoy the expression of outrage on her face.  He pasted a determined leer on his face when the two of them glanced at him self-consciously, however. 

Clair sent him a dagger glare in response.

Simon just looked more confused, angry, and thwarted.   “Why do you not think so?” he demanded, claiming Clair’s full attention again.  “You enjoyed the kiss.”

“I did not!” she snapped indignantly.

If she’d slapped him in the face with a sledge hammer, Simon couldn’t have looked more stunned.  “You did not?” he asked doubtfully.

“No, I did not enjoy being … mauled by you, you jerk!”

“I did not maul you!  I kissed you!” Simon said indignantly.  “I am certain I did it right!”

Seth cleared his throat.  “You don’t want to go there, Simon.”

Simon lifted his head to glare at him in confusion.  “I do not want to go anywhere.  I want to know why she says she did not enjoy my kiss when I detected ….”

“Shut up, damn it!” Seth snapped.  “Never argue with a lady, even when you think she’s not being truthful … about something like that.”

“I do not think it!  I know!” Simon said indignantly.

Clair glared at him through narrowed eyes.  “Conceited jackass!  Just because you think you’re god’s gift to women and you’re good at kissing doesn’t make it so!”

Simon released her, studied her in baffled anger for a moment and then lifted his head to glare at Seth.  “You knew this would happen if I offered to pleasure her,” he said accusingly.

Seth shrugged, unable to keep from grinning.  “Live and learn.  You have to take your knocks like everybody else.”

Simon clenched and unclenched his hands several times.

Seth added to his stupidity by chuckling.

Simon stalked across the room and slung one meaty fist at Seth’s jaw so fast Seth didn’t have time to duck.  The house shook as he landed flat of his back on the floor.  “Get up!” Simon growled, standing over him.

Working his jaw experimentally, Seth pushed himself up on one arm and glared up at his twin.  “At any other time, I’d be happy to oblige, but we have a mission to accomplish and time isn’t something we have a lot of,” he growled back at his brother. 

They studied one another angrily for several long moments, but Simon finally backed away, rolling his shoulders as if forcing the angry tension from his muscles. 

Clair, who’d been studying both men with a mixture of uneasiness and shock, emerged sufficiently to demand an answer.  “What mission?  What the hell is going on here?”

Both men turned to look at her, but Simon turned away almost immediately and stalked from the room.  Clair stared after him, still feeling more than a little weak kneed from their encounter.  As much as she resented his egotistical assumption that she’d thoroughly enjoyed his kiss, there was no denying, to herself at least, that it had sent her into a tailspin.  If it hadn’t been for the alarms screaming in her head, she would’ve been putty in his hands.

Wryly, she admitted the jackass had cause for his conceit.  Despite all reason, despite her certainty that he was a threat to her, he’d annihilated every defense with his practiced touch, every barrier she’d tried to throw up to protect herself, heating her blood to the boiling point. 

Remembering his comment, she felt her face redden. 

He’d known it, too, the jerk!

Well!  He wasn’t that damned good!  Maybe, for a handful of seconds, she’d been putty in his hands, but she’d gathered her wits and given him a set-down! 

Oddly enough, she didn’t feel nearly as victorious as she thought she ought to in having routed Simon.   His anger, she’d expected.  Very few men took rejection well and the aggressiveness of his assault had suggested he would take it very badly.   She was almost as surprised by the mildness of his reaction as she was by his confusion. 

Of course men never could figure that sort of thing out!  They figured if it felt good, to hell with any other consideration.  They couldn’t seem to grasp that women continued to think even when they were high on arousal, that women couldn’t as easily set aside other considerations. 

She still felt as if she’d struck a low blow, she realized, although she wasn’t certain if it was because of her own remarks and actions alone or if it was because she’d realized that Simon had somehow been the butt of a joke Seth had instigated.

That thought brought her attention back to Seth and she discovered he was studying her speculatively.  “You put him up to that, didn’t you?” she said accusingly.

He looked startled and then annoyed.  “What makes you think I would’ve had to?  Or wanted to?  In case you haven’t noticed, Simon doesn’t take orders from me.”

Clair’s lips tightened.  “Actually, it seems to me that he does.”

Surprise flickered in Seth’s eyes, but then he merely shrugged.  “It’s not what you think.”

“How would you know what I think?” Clair demanded indignantly and then answered her own question.  “I think I’m being held prisoner and I don’t even know what’s going on!  Who are you people?  And what are you doing here?  Why are you looking for my mother if you aren’t with the company?”

“What makes you think we aren’t with the company?”

Clair considered it, feeling her heart beat a little faster.  “My mother’s dead and I don’t believe for one minute she killed herself—regardless of what they’re saying.  If you two were with the company, I’d be dead by now.”

Clair didn’t realize she’d been hoping he would laugh at the ridiculous paranoia of such a statement until she saw that, although he seemed a little surprised, he didn’t take it lightly.  “You think you’re in danger?” he asked slowly.

“Am I?” she countered.

He looked a little taken aback and then angry.  “Lady, if you were in any danger from me and Simon you’d be dead now.”

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Clair asked a little hoarsely, although, oddly enough it did.  She hadn’t realized, hadn’t allowed herself to actually dwell on her situation.  It hadn’t been that difficult given the fact that they’d thrown her completely off-kilter from the moment she’d encountered them.  She knew terror and the certainty that she was in danger had been clawing at the back of her mind ever since she’d arrived and found them in her mother’s house, though, even if she hadn’t allowed herself to openly acknowledge it.

She felt cold all over abruptly as it settled in her belly in a hard knot that her attempts to escape and her absolutely stupid, mindless attempt to fight Simon could’ve cost her her life if they’d been the bad men she thought they were.  Very little relief managed to trickle past that realization as the certainty arose that she’d been wrong about them. 

She was lucky Simon hadn’t throttled her just for pounding on him!  That would’ve been sufficient provocation for a lot of people even if they hadn’t had evil designs on her before. 

Seth shook his head at her.  “We came for answers.”  He didn’t bother to add that, if they’d seen her as a threat, they would have disposed of her.  No doubt the moment they left she’d head for the nearest cop and sound the alarm, but nothing she could do would add significantly to the problems they already had.  They were being hunted.  They were dead if they were caught.  Nothing they did from here on out would change that and Clair couldn’t tell the authorities, or the company, anything that would lessen their chances of escape.  They were bound to know the moment they discovered Cole had broken their security that rogues were nearby.  Unlike the Hunters who often worked alone, the Cyborgs had been designed to work together—as a team—and that was part of their programming that hadn’t changed when they had.  Where ever there was one, there would always be more.

He flicked a glance around the room as he calculated just how long Cole had been gone at that thought and realized that, regardless of what Simon had said, Cole should’ve been back by now.  There might be an explanation for his prolonged absence other than the worst case scenario, but his gut was telling him Cole was in trouble—which meant they all were. 

They should clear out while they could, he knew.

“Answers to what?” Clair asked curiously.

Seth shook his head.  “When we leave, you’re free to go.  Until we do, you’ll have to stay put.”

He turned then and left her in sole possession of the room.  Clair stared after him, frowning, trying to decide whether to pursue her curiosity or not.  It seemed to her that ignorance might be safest, but she discovered that, stupid or not, she wanted to know.  She followed him back into the living area.  “I don’t see why you won’t tell me anything.”

Seth sprawled in the chair he’d occupied before.  Simon, she discovered, had paced to the window to stare out watchfully.  The tension in both men was palpable, but she didn’t think it had anything to do with their ‘disagreement’.  They seemed to have dismissed that. 

She discovered she was a little miffed that they had. 

“You don’t know anything about Dr. LaMotte’s research,” Seth said coolly.

Clair’s lips tightened at the subtle insult that proved he didn’t believe she was who she claimed to be, regardless of her papers.  “And this is about that?   Mom’s research?”

Simon turned to look at her, but neither man answered the question.  “Why do you believe that you are in danger?”

Clair looked at him blankly, wondering how he could have heard the comment since he’d already left the room when she mentioned it.  After a moment she dismissed the puzzle and moved to the chair she’d occupied before.  “I don’t know.  I hadn’t consciously acknowledged it until I got here and found the two of you.  I suppose it must have been in the back of my mind, though, or I wouldn’t have immediately assumed that the company had sent you.”  She frowned thoughtfully, considering it.  “I know … knew my mother.  She wasn’t the type to contemplate suicide much less do something like that.”

“Then again, you hadn’t seen her in years.”

Clair glared at Seth.  “Maybe not in person, but we did speak … if only occasionally.  She was a busy woman.  We grew apart as I grew up, but she wasn’t a quitter!  Problem solving was her life.  It was integral to who she was.  I don’t care what sort of problems might have come up, she wouldn’t have just thrown up her hands and given up on trying to solve it!  She didn’t drive her car into that damned piling!  Somebody rigged it, overrode the programming, and it wasn’t her.”

“She could have.”

“If you’re saying she had the no-how, she did.  But she wouldn’t have.”

“So, you concluded that someone had murdered her and they would be after you?”

Clair narrowed her eyes at Seth.  “Do you work at being an asshole?  Or does it just come naturally for you?” she snapped.

A mixture of amusement and anger gleamed in his eyes.  “I have to suppose it’s ingrained,” he drawled.  “Must have been a dominant trait in one of my donors.”

She ignored that provocative comment.  “I concluded I might be in danger because Lyle McGinnis, the CEO of Robotics, Inc., was thoroughly pissed off when he discovered my mother had an heir and the court awarded all of her personal effects to me!  The house belongs to them, apparently, but not her things.  I can’t think of any reason he would’ve been so furious about it except that he thought there was something here that I might find when I went through her things.  Since anything that belonged to the company would still be his, which would leave him no reason to be so furious about it, then he must think there’s something here that could be some sort of threat either to him or the company. 

“There must have been a reason they killed my mother and, if that reason is somewhere in this house, then it makes me a target, too, don’t you think?”  She began to doubt it herself almost as soon as she’d voiced her fears.  Vocalizing the wild thoughts that had been careening through her mind made them suddenly seem just too farfetched to be believable, almost silly, like a nightmare one has that scares the ever-loving shit out of you when you’re asleep and just sounds lame when you try to tell someone about it.  She wasn’t really surprised that Seth looked skeptical, but she was both embarrassed and irritated.

“There’s nothing in the house,” Seth responded.  “We searched it.”