C791 (Cyborgs: More Than Machines) (10 page)

I’ll burn our clothing immediately.
Joe headed to the bathroom where Chloe’s jumpsuit and his hated loincloth littered the floor. Picking them up, he then stuffed them into a wall unit designed to incinerate waste.

“Clothing destroyed. Is the signal gone?”

“No change in emission. I’m on my way to your quarters with a detection unit. Make sure you’re decent.”
Solus’s wry rejoinder had Joe hurrying back out to his room.

“Solus is coming to scan us for bugs.”

In a flash, Chloe popped up from her reclining position and patted her body and hair. “Bugs! Oh gross. What kind?”

Nothing could have stopped his laughter. Not even her glare.

“Not that type of bug,” he snorted as he opened the door to his friend. “I was speaking of the spying kind the military uses.”

“Oh. Well, you could have specified that, you know,” she replied petulantly.

Solus entered carrying a detection unit. Seth crowded in from behind, his eyes unerringly focusing on Chloe. For some reason, it irritated Joe.

“What are you doing here?” growled Joe.

“I wanted to watch in case the bug ends up being somewhere
interesting.
” The waggle of his brows made his meaning clear.

“Out.”

“But—”

“Out or I’ll put my foot somewhere interesting.”

Instead of taking offence, Seth beamed. “Good one, boss. You’re learning. I figure, another hundred years or so and you might be able to pass for a human.”

Joe snarled.

“Or not. I’ll be close by if you need any help.”

The door slid shut behind the exuberant cyborg. His departure meant they could get to the grim task of detecting the bug that Joe should have caught before indulging in coitus with Chloe. He turned to face Solus. “I have not detected any foreign objects on my person so it stands to reason I am not the carrier.”

“Hey, is that your way of saying I’m the spy?” Chloe exclaimed.

“It is not unheard of for the military to tag their employees,” Solus explained in a conciliatory tone that surprised Joe. Given his dislike of humans, he would have expected his friend to immediately assume her guilt. “This won’t hurt. I just need to run this wand over the exterior of your body to look for a signal. Once we find it, we remove the bug and destroy it.”

“Will it hurt?”

“No,” Joe replied, tucking her hand into his. He tried not to bristle as his friend did his job, running the oblong piece of plastic up and down her body, uncomfortably close to parts Joe regarded as
his.
Done with his perusal, with a crease between his brows, Solus started again from her toes, working his way up to her head.

When he’d finished his second pass, he took a step back and shook his head. “It’s not coming from her.”

Joe almost dropped into a defensive stance as two sets of eyes turned to train themselves on him. “Don’t you think I would know if I bore something foreign in my body?”

“Let’s find out.” Solus ran the wand up Joe’s torso. It beeped when it hit the region under his arm. “Lift.”

Frowning himself now, Joe raised his arm. The detector went into a cacophony of beeps as it touched the area.

“Still going to claim you’d know?”

Proven wrong, Joe clamped his lips into a tight line. “Remove it.”

Opening the case he’d brought with him, Solus removed a scalpel and poised it over the skin that hid the transmitter.

“Wait!” Chloe yelled, stepping in front of him, effectively blocking Solus. “Aren’t you going to numb the area, or sterilize it?”

“Why?”

“Because you’re about to cut into his skin, that’s why,” she snapped.

“I’ve told you, little one, we feel little to no pain.”

“Just because your pain receptors aren’t sending the right signal doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.”

“Are all humans this irrational with their thinking?” Solus asked.

“My female is concerned with my wellbeing,” Joe replied in a smug tone. “It is part of her appeal. Your concern is noted, Chloe, but unnecessary. Step aside so that Solus might continue.”

With a mutter that his auditory channels couldn’t quite decipher but sounded a lot like “stupid dumbasses,” she moved out of the way. Not far though. She stared at them with her lips pressed into a tight line and her arms crossed under her breasts. Given how low his shirt hung, this exposed a shadowy cleavage that made Joe more than eager for Solus to be done and gone.

The knife penetrated his skin, not that Joe noticed really, his gaze intent on Chloe. It fascinated him to see how much it bothered her, or so he surmised by her wince and the way she chewed her lower lip. It took less than a minute to extract the bug. Solus held it up with a frown.

“I’ve never seen one like this before, and stranger, while I can see it, I do not feel it.”

“That makes no logical sense.” Joe held out his hand, and Solus dropped the transmitter into his palm. As his friend claimed, while he could see the bug, Joe couldn’t feel it. It proved highly disturbing. He handed the item back.

“Don’t destroy it. Find a way to contain the signal and study it. If the humans have found a way to fool our internal processor, then we need to discover a way to counter it.”

“Right on it, although I won’t be able to do much with the tools on board. It might have to wait until we get planetside. I could also probably use Einstein’s help on this one.” His hand wrapped around the troublesome electronic, Solus left.

A gentle touch startled Joe out of an unresponsive mental loop as his BCI tried to fathom how something could be seen but not felt.

“You’re bleeding,” Chloe said softly.

“No. It has already stopped, and the flesh has begun to heal,” he stated. He lifted his arm, and she wiped her fingers in the lingering blood, as if needing to see for herself.

“That bug thing you guys found is bad news, isn’t it?” she said, peering up at him with troubled eyes. Funny how he could read her emotions so easily, probably because her face was such an expressive mask.

“It is simply new. Our scientific team will decipher its secrets and render it useless. The military might try, but they will never capture us again. We will not return to slavery.”

The hug she gave him was most unexpected. The arms she flung around him clamped tight, and she buried her face in his chest. “I’m sorry,” she muttered.

“Why are you apologizing?” he asked.

“Because humans are such dicks. What they did to you, Solus and the others was wrong. I wish there were a way to make it up to you. To show you that not all of us are evil.”

“I can think of a way,” he replied. Placing his hands on her hips, he hoisted her until she wrapped her legs around his waist. It brought her lips to just the right height for kissing, and kiss him she did with a fierce passion that quickly roused his lust. Shuffling several steps, he brought them to the bed, but she clung to him when he would have lain her down.

“No. Do me like this,” she begged. “Standing. Please. This is going to sound so corny, but your strength is a major turn on.”

He would have given her anything she wanted in that moment because of her simple admission. With a groan, he whirled her until her back pressed against the wall. Using it to brace her, he slid his hands from her hips, one sliding under her buttocks to keep her aloft, the other tearing at the opening to his pants.

She didn’t make his task easy, distracting him with soft kisses up and down the length of his neck. Biting the lobe of his ear, her soft pants were their own form of excitement. Freed, his cock sprang forth and came to rest just under her pussy. He slid his hand between their bodies, intent on rousing her passion, only to discover her dripping wet when he touched her. She moaned against his skin as he rubbed his finger across her clit. As he caressed her, he let his hips guide his rigid cock back and forth against her moist sex, covering it in her honey. She squirmed in his grasp, her intent to sheath him all too clear. But he held off, instead grasping his dick and rubbing the swollen tip against her engorged nub.

“Stop teasing me,” she moaned.

“But I am practicing being bad,” he murmured back before kissing the soft skin of her neck.

“No need for practice. You’re already an expert.”

Placing the head of his shaft at the entrance of her sex, he chuckled as she tried to force him in. “Impatient, little one?”

“I want to come all over your cock,” she murmured. “Don’t you want to feel me squeezing all around you?”

By all the nanos in his body, he did. He slammed into her welcoming heat, yelling at the exquisite tight feel of her around him. With both her ass cheeks held in the palms of his hands, he pumped her, driving his dick in and out of her sex, trembling as he strove to hold on when her muscles convulsed and quivered all around him. She bit him as she keened her pleasure, her loss of control sending him over the edge. He shot his cream into her, gasping as her sex milked him dry.

Shuddering, breathing heavy and shaken, because it seemed each sexual encounter with her became more and more intense, he sought for a way to lighten the mood and distract him from the words that fought to get free from his tongue.

“Apology accepted.”

Her body went still for a moment before she erupted into gales of laughter, a mirth he joined. But the words he’d almost uttered —
I love you
— rang inside his mind. His BCI spun in circles, trying to understand the logic that drove him to want to say such a thing. But while the machine side of him did not understand, the man that remained understood and hugged tighter the female who’d reminded him of his stolen humanity.

Chapter Six

The voyage to the asteroid outpost took several days, not that Chloe took note or cared. Joe kept her entertained both in bed and out. In the bedroom, he made her scream in pleasure; outside of it, she made him groan as she taught him how to act more human because, despite his capture and the new worrisome bug, Joe was determined to go back and resume the search for secrets on the cyborgs’ creation.

“Aren’t you afraid of getting caught again?”

His arched brow spoke eloquently of what he thought of her query.

“Don’t give me that look. Did Seth teach you that?”

His pleased grin dropped when he mumbled, “Maybe.”

“Seriously though. I know you had them dancing your tune when we met. And with reason. But, they’re going to learn from their mistakes. You might not get away so easily next time.”

“But without taking any risks, we won’t get any answers.”

“What exactly are you looking for? What’s so important you would risk your life to discover it?”

Leaning back in his seat, his eyes took on a faraway cast, and when he spoke, she wasn’t sure if spoke so much to her as himself.

“When I woke after the EMP pulses on Gamma 15, I woke not knowing who I was. I followed orders because it seemed easiest and tried to understand why, suddenly, the world appeared so strange around me. And yet at the same time, so familiar. I watched. I listened. I heard a lot of things said about cyborgs, most of them derogatory. But none of them explained how I’d become part machine. Who I was.

“I needed to know but couldn’t find out while I was a slave. Then, I overheard the order to kill us, to march us out into space like useless garbage. As Seth would say, I flipped my lid.” When he would have paused, she waved him on, fascinated at his story. “After the rebellion, I fled with the brothers who survived. We roamed the stars in search of a place to call our own. We found one and began to build, but one question kept cropping up. Not just with our group either. In some paradox of circumstance, we found others like us and they asked the same thing. Why? Why was this done to us? Who dared? I wanted an answer so I, and a chosen few, began raiding military establishments. Mostly space ones where we’d spent most of our time in servitude. We discovered nothing we didn’t already know. So we widened our search. On some planets with human outposts and settlements, we found others who’d woken and freed their brethren. They shared our curiosity and gave us more questions too.”

“And so you kept looking for answers?”

“Actually, at some point, as we progressed in our mental liberation, we came to understand why they did it. It turned out to be really quite simple. The military did it because they think themselves above the laws humans created.”

“No one is above the law,” she stated.

He arched a brow. “Do you truly believe that?”

She opened her mouth to say yes but instead clamped it shut. The military had done things of late beyond their accepted scope of power. And lied about it. Where were the consequences? Did anyone in the government even care or did they aid and abet the military in their quest to remain in power?

A sad smile emerged. “The truth is a hard thing to accept. But we did and moved on. Our reason to keep searching has since become a more basic one. As the military keeps hunting us and our numbers dwindle, survival is now of utmost importance. Now we look for how they did it, how they meshed man and machine to create us. You see, while we can repair active units and replace defective parts, or even enhance programming, we cannot create more cyborgs. We are a society doomed to extinction.”

“You can’t procreate at all?”

“Human ovum are destroyed by our nano imbued sperm, making fertilization impossible.”

“While I’m sure your lessons on our inadequacies is fascinating, your skill is required elsewhere,” interrupted Solus coldly.

A shame, because Chloe found this loquacious side of Joe riveting. It revealed him and the other cyborgs in a light she’d not thought of before. A new species just trying to survive, looking for the same thing any race would—answers to their existence and a way to leave a legacy.

“I will escort you to my quarters,” Joe offered.

“I’d rather stay here,” she replied. “It’s more fun to watch movies on the big screen, and I am going to scrounge for something to eat.”

“As you wish. I will return once my task is complete.” He strode from the room, the view of his rear just as appetizing as his front, and she sighed. Possibly even smiled a little goofily. And someone noticed.