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Cyberevolution IV:
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
By
Kaitlyn O’Connor
© copyright by Kaitlyn O’Connor, January 2008
Cover Art by Eliza Black, © copyright January 2008
ISBN 978-1-60394-126-6
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
Police work could be tedious, especially on stakes outs, but this went beyond the pale. Zoe realized she was well past bored, also beyond uneasy. She’d always been a nervous space traveler, and that was when she was traveling coach on a commercial line. If anyone had ever asked her if there was any circumstance that would make her consider traveling solo, and well beyond the frontier, she would’ve told them to be sure and send her for a psyche evaluation if she announced such a thing.
“What the hell am I doing out here?” she muttered to herself for the umpteenth time.
“You are searching for your sister, who was kidnapped by rogue cyborgs,” the computer responded promptly.
Zoe glared at the console. “Half-sister,” she muttered after a significant pause while she tried to decide if responding to the computer constituted space dementia.
“You are searching for your half-sister, who ….”
“Shut up!” Zoe said irritably. She drummed her fingers on the console for a few minutes. “How far are we from the nearest habitable planet?”
Silence greeted the question.
Zoe rolled her eyes. The computer, naturally, was equipped with AI. Unfortunately, even with artificial intelligence, it tended to take everything literally. If being alone for so long didn’t tip her over the edge, she thought the damned computer was going to drive her insane. “Computer respond!” she snapped.
“The last habitable planet surveyed is seventy two hours, thirty three minutes, ten seconds earth standard time, from the current position of the Evening Star 9120, traveling at full hyper-drive. Folding would reduce the estimated time to reach the habitable planet to twenty hours, five minutes, thirty seven seconds. In the event of damage to the Evening Star 9120, it would be necessary to re-calculate the time required to reach the habitable planet according to the drive status.”
Zoe narrowed her eyes. Unfortunately, the computer hadn’t been programmed to react to a glare. “Didn’t I tell you that I wanted you to survey everything and search for anything even remotely habitable?”
“I was ordered to survey worlds we passed close enough to to utilize long range sensors.”
“And?” Zoe demanded, holding onto her patience with an effort.
“The last habitable planet ….”
“What about around us? In front of us?”
“Would you like for me to do that now?”
“Now would be a good time, yes,” Zoe snapped, infuriated to discover, after nearly three months of traveling, no less, that the damned computer had interpreted her command to mean only the bodies they passed. If she hadn’t known better, she would’ve suspected the thing was deliberately trying to thwart her efforts to find Bronte. Slumping in the pilot’s seat, she resumed drumming her fingers on the console, trying to bring her irritation under control. It was singularly pointless to rail at the computer, although a rousing good argument right about now might help to blow off some of her steam.
She missed her partner, and that was saying something because he rarely had more than two words to say to her—‘let’s go’ and ‘want donuts?’.
Truthfully she supposed she didn’t miss him nearly as much as she missed the life she’d flushed down the toilet to come on this wild goose chase.
She didn’t even know Bronte. She didn’t understand why she’d felt this compulsion to throw everything away that she’d worked so hard for and go after her.
She’d always meant to meet her half sister—at some point.
She’d told herself that for years anyway, almost ever since she’d discovered her biological father—the randy two-timing bastard—had been contracted and already expecting a child when he’d been pumping her mother.
Well, not quite that long, she supposed. She’d been eight years old before she had actually discovered her background, not that it had required any sleuthing on her part. Her mother had gone ballistic when the old bastard’s woman had died and she’d discovered he still didn’t mean to contract with her. She’d spilled the whole tale then, and Zoe had discovered that, not only did she have a name and face to put with ‘father’, but she had a sister, too, one that was only a few months older than she was.
By the time she’d gotten into her teens, she’d been too resentful over the fact that her father refused to acknowledge her to look kindly upon the ‘accepted’ one. At the same time, she’d yearned to get to know her. She’d spent her entire childhood wishing she had a sibling, desperately in need of a playmate and friend that would be there when no one else was.
There’d been no chance of that, though. Her father had taken care to keep his two families separate. The closest she’d come to meeting her sister was a chance glimpse now and then while she was growing up. She’d lost track of Bronte completely for years, until she’d shown up to take over the old man’s practice.
That shouldn’t have bothered her, but it did. Even though it was completely logical and understandable that Bronte, who’d studied to be a doctor, would step in their father’s shoes, and yet it had resurrected all the old feelings of having been shunted aside, the feelings of unworthiness.
She’d let those feelings keep her away, and now she’d missed her chance to get to know her sister.
She pushed those thoughts aside. She wasn’t going to just accept defeat.
It had been a blow when she’d been called in to investigate the abduction and discovered it was Bronte that had been taken. The rogue bastards had taken her with them, though. She didn’t know why, but she knew damned well there wouldn’t have been any reason to take Bronte if they’d meant to kill her.
She was alive—somewhere.
If it had been anyone but Bronte, she would’ve accepted that it was a closed case, impossible to bring to a satisfactory conclusion. Officially, she’d done just that, closed it on orders from her superiors. On a personal level, it sure as hell hadn’t been a closed matter, however, and when she’d found out about the reward the company was offering for information leading to the stronghold of the rogue cyborgs, she’d taken leave from the force, sold everything she had to come up with the money she needed to pursue the case ….
And here she was in the middle of no fucking where, running out of patience because she could see she wasn’t going to crack this case and find her sister.
In a matter of a few weeks, the company she’d leased the Evening Star from was going to report it stolen, and that was the least of her worries. She’d taken two month’s leave, and she’d been gone for three already—no job. She’d sold everything she owned to finance her jaunt—which meant she was flat broke because failure also meant she wasn’t going to get a dime of the reward money she thought she’d get to put her life back together.
“Shit!” she growled, surging out of her seat and prowling the small cockpit area of the Evening Star. “They’ve got to be out here somewhere! They need basically the same things we do, damn it to hell! It isn’t like they could just live on a rock!”
Ok, so technically, they weren’t ‘alive’ to begin with, but they’d been designed and manufactured by humans and she knew from studying the information on the ‘borgs that they had been constructed from almost as much biological material as inorganic and that meant, as far as she could see, that they needed a lot of the same things to sustain them. She’d seen the vids of the abduction. There was no deterioration of the skin or flesh that sheathed their titanium chassis. She might not be a scientist, but it didn’t take that to figure out that the organic materials would’ve been damaged if they’d been living under conditions detrimental to humans.
That comforted her because she knew it meant Bronte had a better chance of staying alive until she could rescue her. It also limited the options insofar as where the rogues were holed up.
She still didn’t quite get that.
She wasn’t buying the story the company had spun on it.
She’d watched the security vids and she damned sure didn’t see anything, beyond the kidnapping itself, that pointed to ‘crazed’. They’d planned and executed a virtually flawless abduction.
She wasn’t buying the ‘wrong place, wrong time’ scenario. Bronte had been clueless. They could’ve gotten in and out and she would never have tumbled to what they were doing.
It didn’t escape her that they took Bronte after the alarm had been tripped and the private security force had arrived on the scene. Maybe they’d taken her as a hostage, thinking that would stop them from trying to shoot them down, but not only did something like that require logical thinking, but they also hadn’t made any attempt to utilize her as a hostage, hadn’t tried to contact the ships firing on them at all.
They hadn’t used her as a shield when they were fleeing across the roof either. They’d been protecting her from fire.
She stopped pacing when she reached a view port, staring out into the vast ocean of space. She didn’t believe it was wishful thinking to interpret the abduction as she had, although she was aware that she wasn’t as completely subjective as she needed to be. There were just too many things that pointed to a predetermined abduction to dismiss it.
The cyborgs had hit the med center with the intention of taking ‘a’ doctor, if not Bronte in particular. They’d gone straight to her offices, emptied it, and taken her, as well. They hadn’t even attempted to access any of the other offices. There was nothing even remotely random about it, regardless of what those assholes at the company said to the contrary.
The question was, why? Why Bronte? Why a doctor at all when they were nothing but machines? Why hadn’t they hit the company and made off with records regarding their construction? Why not carry off a tech from the company if they thought they needed something?
“I have determined that there is a sixty percent probability that there is a habitable star system just beyond range of my sensors,” the computer announced abruptly, breaking into Zoe’s thoughts.
* * * *
“I have been thinking,” Kameron announced abruptly.
Damien, who had been perusing the communications from their home world, lifted his head and turned to stare at Kameron blankly, his dark brows drawn together in a frown of puzzlement as he scanned his memory for any indication that Kameron had been speaking to him before, any clue of what Kameron might have been thinking about.
He drew a blank. He could not recall that Kameron had said anything at all to him for several day cycles and the last communication had been regarding the length of time they had until they were relieved of sentry duty and would be allowed to return home. He was fairly certain that they had finished that conversation.
“I have been reviewing the available females,” Kameron continued before Damien could respond, “and I have decided that I will court Dalia. She has only two males in her household.”
“Reuel’s woman?” Damien responded doubtfully.
Kameron glared at him. “The law says she can take four. Reuel can not object.”
“He will remove your head from your shoulders,” Damien disputed. “Why else do you think Dalia has only two partners? She is beautiful, and a hunter besides being a proven breeder.”
“By law, he can not object,” Kameron retorted, his face taking on a belligerent expression.
Damien stared at Kameron while he considered the situation. After a few moments, a memory surfaced. It flickered at the edges of his consciousness for a few moments more before it emerged completely. “Is she not the hunter who nearly killed you when we were on Rialto?”
Kameron’s swarthy complexion took on a reddish hue. His frown deepened. “She did not even come close to terminating me,” he said stiffly.
“You came away from that battle with two holes in you and a broken arm,” Damien reminded him.
“Exactly!” Kameron agreed. “Nothing life threatening. She terminated the two who were with me. I escaped while she was occupied with them.”
Damien nodded, then frowned again. “Do you think she will recall that she battled you in the past?”
Kameron shrugged. “If she does, it is certain to make a good impression upon her that she did not succeed in terminating me. There are not many who have faced her in battle and walked away from it.”
Damien considered that and finally nodded again. “A female would not respect a male she could best in a fight. It says that in the mating manual. ‘Females will only agree to breed with strong males’.”
A look of uneasiness flickered across Kameron’s features. “There must be more to it than that.”
Damien shrugged. “It also says that you must be ‘attractive’ to the female and find ‘favor’.”
Kameron pursed his lips. “What do you suppose they meant by that?”
“That is the ‘courtship’ part,” Damien responded, nodding decisively.
Kameron glared at him. “I have accessed the manual, as well,” he retorted testily. “It seemed to me that the female must find the male attractive, first, before she will even allow courtship. How is one to determine that?”
Damien stared at him blankly for several moments, considering it, and then shrugged. “I am not certain.” He reviewed the file for anything that might explain it. “I must suppose that a male can only determine that if the female allows him to court her.”
Kameron shoved to his feet and began to prowl the bridge restlessly. “It also says that a female will study the male with interest if she finds him attractive,” he growled. “I have not noted that any of the females study the cyborgs with interest, have you? They are far too busy studying the hunters. How did the others get a female? That is what I would like to know!”
“Gideon CS46721 and his men, Jerico CS98300, and Gabriel CS61167 have contracted with a human female.”
Kameron jolted to a halt and swiveled around to stare at Damien, his jaw sliding to half mast. “A human female?” he echoed after a prolonged moment of disbelieving silence.
“It is in the news dispatches,” Damien said.
Kameron surged to the console and shoved Damien out of the way. “Where?” he demanded.
Damien glared at him when he’d gotten to his feet again, but finally shrugged. “They were in route to our world. It was the group that was sent on the mission to extract a doctor.”
Kameron flicked a distracted glare at him. “Cyborgs,” he muttered. “Why would a human female accept Cyborgs when even the Cyborg females favor the hunters?”
Damien shrugged, although Kameron wasn’t looking at him. “Mayhap they forced her to sign the contracts?” he guessed.
Kameron turned to glare at him. “It says right here that she accepted them!” he said, stabbing a finger at the vid screen. “She was assured that she would be protected if they had used coercion to get her to agree, and she accepted them. She even claimed affection for them!”
Shoving to his feet, Kameron began to pace again. “They are not more handsome than I,” he muttered under his breath. “I am a series 45. I can not believe that they would have evolved faster than I, so it can not be that they have a better understanding of the courtship process.”
“Gideon CS46721 has yellow hair,” Damien pointed out. “Mayhap the female found that appealing?”
Kameron halted, staring at Damien for several moments while he accessed his memory banks. Finally, he shook his head. “Jerico CS98300 and Gabriel CS61167 are dark haired as we are. It can not be that. There are as many of dark hair who have a female as there are who are fair.”
Damien frowned, reluctant to give up his theory, particularly when it soothed his own smarting ego to consider that the fact that he hadn’t managed to catch the interest of a female might have to do with coloring. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more certain he was that it must be something like that. Physically, aside from coloring—and of course a variation in facial features depending upon their genetic donors—there wasn’t a great deal of difference in any of the cyborgs. They had been designed to be physically appealing since the company had wanted to insure versatility in their end use, but it was considered most likely that they would be sold to the government to be used for soldiers—which, in point of fact, they had been. That being the case, they had been designed to be physically intimidating, ranging in height from six foot two to six foot five inches and heavily muscled.
They were all prime physical specimens. All documentation pointed to that conclusion, so there should not be any reason why one cyborg would be more appealing than another to the female—unless it had to do with the coloring.
“I am certain it must have been the yellow hair,” he informed Kameron. “They work as a team. Gideon took point—secured the female—and then she accepted them all because they were a squad and she saw the logic of contracting with the squad since she would have been required to accept at least two.”
“It was not the yellow hair!” Kameron growled. “And human females have no logic, so she would not merely have accepted because it was the logical thing to do!”
Damien planted his fists on his hips in a belligerent stance. “What is your theory then?” he demanded.
Kameron eyed the antagonistic stance Damien had taken. “I do not have a theory … yet. I am still collating the data,” he snarled.
“If you do not have a theory of your own,” Damien said in a low, menacing voice, “then why have you dismissed mine?”
“Because it is not logical!”
“Emotions are not logical!” Damien shot back at him.
“Attraction is not an emotion! It is a physical and chemical reaction between a male and female that denotes compatibility in breeding on an unconscious level! In other words, instinct—because the human is an animal and animals are instinctually drawn to certain attributes that they subconsciously wish to pass to their off-spring! It states that clearly in the manual!”
“Ah ha!” Damien shot back at him triumphantly. “As you say—physical! And, physically, we are all much the same except for a variation in the color of the hair and eyes!”
Kameron studied his companion through narrowed eyes. “My face is not the same as yours. In that respect we are as different from one another as the humans are. And I must say, my gene donor was undoubtedly far more handsome than yours!”
“There is nothing wrong with my face!” Damien snarled. “It is as symmetrical as yours!”
“Except the nose,” Kameron muttered, dismissing the argument and turning to pace again.
Damien lifted a hand to examine his nose self-consciously since there was no reflective surface nearby to check it. “What is wrong with my nose?”
Kameron shrugged. “Aside from the fact it is nearly a millimeter too long for your features to be completely symmetrical? Nothing. Mine, on the other hand, is precisely the right length, besides being aquiline, which is considered both noble and aristocratic by humans.”
Damien dropped his hand and glared at Kameron.
“Your mouth is not entirely symmetrical either.”
Damien ground his teeth together. “I suppose your mouth is also aristocratic?” he said in a credible attempt at sarcasm, although it seemed to pass right over Kameron’s head.
“No. It is considered sensual.”
“By whom?” Damien growled.
“It is in the manual—the part where it describes the more desirable traits in a mate.”
“Since you do not have a mate anymore than I, then I will assume that your comprehension of the data is far below one hundred percent.”
“Are you suggesting that my processors are faulty?” Kameron demanded in a low, dangerous growl.
Damien smirked at him. “I do not think that I suggested any such thing.” He ducked the fist Kameron swung at him and landed a quick jab to Kameron’s perfect—no sensual—lips in retaliation, marring their perfection nicely. They’d just grabbed each other around the throat when the sensor alarm went off.
Both men froze, for a handful of seconds certain that they’d inadvertently slammed into something while they were tussling.
“Proximity breach,” the computer intoned. “Buoy number 8-7-0.”
Kameron and Damien both shot a quick glance at the console before they looked at one another again.
“A craft? Out here?”
“Replacement crew?” Damien hazarded a guess.
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