The Cyborg Recruitment Project

by Sara Rustan

  But Thorgan just rolled his eyes. “Hello? Have you forgotten who – what – I am? I’ve seen lots of female orgasms with my cyborg senses. Because until I figured out I wasn’t going to get it up again, I spent a lot of time pleasuring my former girlfriend. And I know damn well that you didn’t come.” He sat up and crossed his arms, too. “So why don’t you answer the question?”

  Jolie just firmed her lips and looked away.

  “I’ll take that as a no.” He frowned. “What about with a vibrator?”

  She blushed. She had done a striptease – or part of one – without blushing. She had sex with the guy without blushing. Now she blushed. “Do we really have to dissect my sexual inadequacies right now?” She glared at him.

  “Yes. We do.” He settled back against the wall. “Because I fully intend to have more sex with you, and I like to do things right. So I’ll assume that’s a ‘yes’ with the vibrator.” He narrowed his eyes in thought. “What about women?”

  “What do you mean?” Was he asking what she thought he was asking?

  “Hmm. So no experience with women.”

  Dammit. She wished he would stop doing that. She didn’t answer his questions, but somehow he seemed to be getting his answers all the same.

  “When you’re using the vibrator, what’s your favorite fantasy?”

  She slid off the bed and tightened her hands into fists. “Get this through your rock-hard head. I will not discuss my fantasies with you,” she said through gritted teeth.

  “Yes, you will,” he said confidently.

  A bell clanged from the speakers in the corner of the room.

  Thorgan flicked his fingers and a computer status screen appeared on one wall, which he inspected briefly. “But not right now.” He stood up, picked up her clothes, and tossed them to her. “We’ve got to leave immediately. An inspection ship is on the way and will be here in two hours.”

  Saved by the bell.

  * * * * *

  Twenty minutes later Jolie’s ship was heading toward the closest jump point at top speed. She was in the pilot’s seat, probably only because Thorgan didn’t want to waste time arguing about it. She looked at him from the corner of her eyes. He still looked ticked off about the five minutes’ delay from her shower.

  Hey, this was a small ship, with only sponge bath facilities and a dry shower. Technically, a dry shower got you clean. But you sure didn’t feel clean. And she was going to be cooped up with Thorgan for at least a couple of days.

  Giving him plenty of time to grill her on her sexual fantasies. Or would he just give up? The facilities on this ship weren’t exactly conducive to hot, sweaty sex, consisting of two narrow bunks, a tiny galley, and the control cabin. On the other hand, until half an hour ago Thorgan hadn’t had sex in six years, and he seemed to be the persistent type.

  Jolie wasn’t sure what she wanted. Nah, that was a lie. What she wanted was to have screaming, explosive sex and come for hours. But if she had to choose between no sex and dissecting her sexual reactions and still failing… Frankly, she’d take “no sex.”

  Thorgan’s deep voice interrupted her. “Have you done a full systems check? Can this model dissipate the ion trail?”

  She bristled. This was her ship. “I’m perfectly capable of piloting this vehicle.”

  He sighed. “Yeah, yeah. I’m sure you’ve had the usual layman’s course in piloting small craft, right?”

  Without looking at him, she gave a stiff nod.

  “Well, I’m a professional deep-space operator, with both commercial and military training in multiple types of craft. And I’m a milspec cyborg, with reaction times typically ten times faster than yours and the ability to soft-sync with the controls.” He raised an eyebrow. “Which of us do you think has a better chance of evading Union kestrels if they send them after us?”

  She rubbed her temples, and consciously tried to relax the surge of irritation that flowed through her. Because he was right. This was no time to be getting all territorial and huffy, just because he was a testosterone-soaked male. Let’s face it, if it was a female cyborg that she had rescued, she would have handed the controls over without a peep. Of course, considering her personal proclivities, she wouldn’t have been feeling like a sexual failure with a female cyborg – and therefore wouldn’t be feeling so defensive. But she couldn’t let that interfere with doing what was right.

  She locked the console into temporary automatic mode, and shoved her seat back. “You’re right. You should have the pilot’s seat. Swap with me.”

  He smiled at her. “Good girl.”

  She looked at him in amazement and shook her head. He liked pushing all her buttons. He had to. Because nobody could rile her so often accidentally.

  There was barely room for one person in the short distance between their seats. Considering Thorgan’s size, their bodies had to press against each other as they squeezed through to exchange seats. He stopped halfway and didn’t let her pass. When she looked up in exasperation, he smiled down at her, and tilted up her chin with his thumb. Heat flashed through her, and all those susceptible body parts felt like they were melting. She could feel his swelling erection against her abdomen.

  He lowered his head to press a soft, sweet kiss on her lips, and then flicked her nose and moved on – making sure to keep that physical contact until the last second.

  He settled into the pilot’s seat and buckled and plugged in with practiced, efficient movements. He was clearly an expert at this. “We’re heading for JX5?” he asked.

  “That was the plan they gave me.”

  A map of the system snapped into place in the front of the cabin, rotating and zooming at Thorgan’s commands. After a minute of study, he said, “It’s the closest jump point, but it’s all out in the open. No place to hide. I’m going to head for JM7. If we get any pursuit, that asteroid belt could come in useful.”

  Jolie scanned the records for JM7. “But it doesn’t come out very far into Federation space. It will take us almost a week more to make the two extra jumps.”

  “We have enough fuel to make it to a refueling stop, so it’s just a matter of extra time and some money.” He raised an eyebrow at her. “They did give you a refueling budget, right?”

  She nodded.

  “And if we’re followed…”

  Her eyes widened. “Followed? You think they’ll follow us? The FIA told me that they wouldn’t follow me into Federation space.”

  He snorted. “They’re not supposed to. But if you think that the Union patrols always do what they’re supposed to, you’ve been consuming too many pollyanna drugs.” He settled against the padded back of the chair. “If they think I hooked up with some smuggler operating on the edges of the Union-Federation border shipping black market goods, they’re more likely to let me go than if they think I’m defecting with the assistance of FIA.”

  Jolie felt like she was in a different universe than the one she was familiar with. Smugglers? Black market? The Federation Intelligence Agency had told her this was a foolproof, straightforward operation, a simple matter of dashing in, grabbing the cyborg, and returning to the Federation. Had they lied to her?

  “A jump to the middle of Federation space has ‘FIA’ written all over it. A jump to the edge says ‘smuggler.’ So we’re going to the edge.”

  She wished that she knew Thorgan better, knew more about smugglers and Union raids into Federation space, knew more about her employer. Because right now she felt incompetent to make any decisions at all. She was out of her league in more ways than one.

  * * * * *

  Two hours later, a mere fifteen minutes from the JM7 jump point, the distinctive signature of a Union inspection ship showed up on the monitors, heading in their direction. The tension level in the control cabin of Jolie’s little ship ratcheted up a whole bunch of notches.

  Thorgan knew that the inspection ship – probably a cruiser class Prander several years old, judging by past visits – wouldn’t be able to catch up with the
m before they hit the jump point. The question was whether they would be able to follow them. Unfortunately, the Union ship was close enough to be able to read their craft’s emissions, so their jump target would be obvious. But would they follow?

  “Strap in for jump,” he told Jolie.

  She gave him a quick glance. “They can’t catch us, can they?”

  “Not on this side. If they had been a few minutes earlier, we might have had to hide among the asteroids, but now we’re better off making a run for it.”

  “They know we’re here?”

  “Oh, yeah. If we can see them, they can see us even better. Their equipment is much better than what we have on this runabout.”

  Proof of that came moments later when the Union hailed them on the inter-ship communicator. “Identify yourself, or prepare to be treated as an enemy combatant.”

  She nibbled on a fingernail. “Will they know this is a Federation ship?”

  He hesitated. “I’m not sure. The company that makes these is in the Federation, so it had to have come from there originally. But there’s some flow of goods and vehicles across the border, so it’s conceivable that a legitimate Union citizen might own one. But since we’re not answering their hail, we have to be either smugglers or Federation.”

  “Couldn’t we have a broken communicator?”

  “Oh, I suppose it’s vaguely possible that we could be stupider than a grazbeast in heat and taking a jump with a broken communicator.” He shook his head. “But if I were them, I’d go for one of the other two options.”

  For the next fifteen minutes, Thorgan watched as the distance between them and the Union ship steadily narrowed. There wasn’t anything he could do about it, but it was still nerve-wracking to watch. He could see that Jolie was wound tighter than a disrupter coil, too, but at least she was staying quiet. He liked that in a woman. There was nothing that could drive you to drink quicker on the bridge of a ship than pointless female chatter.

  Finally, with a roar of their engines, they hit the jump point. Space twisted around them. For a couple of nano-seconds they ceased existing. Thorgan’s body objected violently to the reconstitution, and he controlled his nausea with an effort.

  Jolie was slumped against her seat, her face pasty and her breathing fast.

  “Well, that wasn’t too bad,” Thorgan said.

  Jolie opened her eyes to look at him with befuddled amazement. “Huh? Not bad? You could have fooled me.”

  Once the systems were recovered from the jump, he headed for the nearest planet. They could hide on the other side while waiting to see if they had been followed. He kept his eyes on the ship’s sensor readouts, looking for signs of smugglers. He knew that they used this system – he had caught their energy signatures as they zipped past his space station on the way to this jump point – but he wasn’t sure exactly where. They had some of the same contradictory needs for concealment and the lack of it as sex workers. They didn’t want to be so obvious that they could be easily picked up by the law, but they needed to be available for their customers.

  A large, island continent had some tell-tale traces of ship emissions trailing toward a spot on one coast. That was probably the smuggler base. Thorgan ducked behind one of the two moons and matched trajectories with it so that they were hovering on the side away from the jump exit.

  Jolie was gripping the arms of her seat so hard that her knuckles were white. She whispered, “Did they follow us?”

  “That’s what we’re waiting to find out.” He turned back to monitor the external viewers. “And you can stop whispering. The sound of our voices won’t be picked up.”

  She cleared her throat. “I knew that. I… It just felt strange to talk out loud.”

  “Relax, sweetheart. We’ll probably be sitting here for a while. Why don’t you get up and stretch? You could bring me some rations, while you’re at it.”

  She bristled at that, but unstrapped and stomped off. He repressed a snicker. She was distracted from her anxiety by irritation at him, which had been his goal. It was fun to push her buttons. She was bundle of contradictions, the little doctor. She was sweet and warm and soft inside, but covered with prickles and defensiveness. He would enjoy finding his way to her soft, sweet center.

  At that thought parts of his anatomy stirred to life, and he enjoyed the feeling before reluctantly using his cyborg controls to prevent arousal. This was not the time to be distracted. He glanced at the chronometer. But in, oh, about one point five hours…

  A small ship took off from the probable location of the smuggler base, and he kept a close eye on it until it disappeared behind a thick layer of clouds. Had the smugglers detected their ship? He would guess they had. But what would they do about it? Normally, smugglers weren’t aggressive with unknown ships, unless they were indulging in a bit of piracy.

  They sat there, breathing in and out, all their attention glued to the readouts, colorfully coded holographic figures floating on the wall. The minute arrived when the Union ship should appear if it was following them, and Thorgan leaned forward, all his muscles tense. A tiny light flickered to the side of the jump point, and disappeared. That couldn’t have been the inspection ship. It would have had a much larger, much easier to read signature. “Analyze activity at MZ72 LX39.”

  “Transient light from unknown source. Possible reflection from asteroid or dust. No sign of human craft or jump drives.” The computer’s voice was flat and monotonous.

  Thorgan pounded his fists against the arms of the pilot’s seat in frustration. If there was anything worse than being followed by the Union ship, it was not knowing whether or not they had been followed. That anomalous flicker might be a coincidence. But believe in too many coincidences in dangerous situations like this, and he just might end up coincidentally dead.

  Jolie waved a hand to capture his attention. “So. Did they follow us or not?”

  “I’m not sure,” he snapped.

  “Not sure?” She frowned. “How can you not be sure?”

  He took a deep breath. No need to take his frustration out on Jolie. It certainly wasn’t her fault that the equipment on this ship wasn’t quite good enough for their needs. “At about the time the Union would have come through the jump point, there was a tiny flash of light nearby. Unfortunately, our sensors aren’t good enough to tell what it was. But it wasn’t the inspection ship. We can cross that one off the list.”

  “But what else could it be?”

  “Well, it might be –” Messages flashed on the control screen and Thorgan broke off. “Goddess damn it! Here come the smugglers with the welcome wagon.”

  The viewscreen showed a shabby old Slotnik cruiser heading toward them from the other side of the moon. It looked like it should have been retired several decades ago, but he was sure that was just protective coloring. Smugglers put all their credits into speed and function. Appearance was the least of their concerns.

  Thorgan grabbed Jolie’s shoulder. “Let me do the talking. Don’t say anything unless you have to.”

  “But –”

  “These people are dangerous. If they don’t like our story, they’ll blow us out of the water without a second’s hesitation.”

  Jolie nodded. “Got it. I won’t say a word.”

  The communicator hummed. “Identify yourselves.”

  Even though Thorgan knew what he was going to say, had known it when he made the decision to come this way, his mind still frantically turned over the possibilities. But no brilliant alternatives came to him. “I’m a Union cyborg – uh, former Union cyborg – looking to go into business for myself. We’re just passing through on our way to a business opportunity in the Lorden sector.” The Lorden sector was a hard-scrabble area of the Federation, known for the high level of crime, corruption, and depravity. He hoped it would give them the message that he was one of them.

  There was no response for a very long fifteen seconds. Were they aiming their ship-to-ship guns? He flicked on the cyborg functions to keep him co
ol and collected. Finally, another message crackled. “How many aboard? Who else is with you?”

  “Just me and my girlfriend.”

  Jolie rolled her eyes at that one, but kept silent.

  Another ten seconds of silence. No doubt they were communicating with the boss. “We will escort you to our base. Any attempt to flee or signs of arming and we will destroy you. Understand?”

  “Understand.” Thorgan turned the sound pickup off, slumped back in his seat, and sighed in relief, setting the automatic pilot to follow the smuggler’s ship.

  Jolie’s eyes were wide, her skin pale. “We’re going to the smuggler base?” Her voice was high and thin.

  “Yeah.”

  “But isn’t that…dangerous?”

  What was the FIA thinking, sending such an innocent on this job? If – make that when – they finished this run, he was going to have words with somebody. Meanwhile… He gave Jolie a smile that he hoped was reassuring. “Not as dangerous as the alternative. If we play this right, we should be okay. You have to remember that smugglers are business people first, criminals second.”

  “What about my equipment? The medical unit?”

  Damn. That was pretty valuable and might tempt someone to a bit of piracy. “Can it be locked down so that nobody can use it?”

  “It’s already coded to my DNA and iris pattern. Obviously, someone with the right equipment could change that, but I doubt that anybody on this smuggler base would have it.”

  He frowned. “Some of these smugglers are pretty sophisticated. But I think the odds are against it. I don’t imagine that much medical hardware goes through here. The hot products in this sector are jewels, duplinium, and pharmaceuticals.” He tapped his fingers on the console. “We’re going to have to play this one by ear. I’ll do my best to save your unit, but our lives come first.”

  “Of course,” she murmured.

  The ship entered the atmosphere, with all of the rattles and hums of a planetary landing. Several minutes later, they landed in an area surrounded by a security dome. Thorgan initiated the sequence to shut down and open the doors, and unfastened himself from the pilot’s seat.