Even as he watched, the sleeping/snoring man inhaled a piece, coughed and began to choke. He jackknifed upright, holding his throat and hacked until he managed to cough up the ball. When it hit the floor, he stared at it blankly for several moments and then turned his head and gave the ‘man’ in the adjoining cell the evil eye.
“What the fuck?” Cole snarled.
Chance narrowed his eyes in response. “I am sick of listening to that noise you make when you are supposed to be sleeping.”
Cole bounded up and launched himself at the bars that separated the cells, trying to grab Chance by the throat.
Chance wrapped his fingers around his wrist and used Cole’s arm to slam him against the bars several times and then released him.
Cole fumed, but he was completely awake now and conscious of having made a jackass out of himself by trying to get hold of Chance and giving him the opportunity to retaliate in a thoroughly humiliating way.
“Asshole,” he growled.
Chance made a rude gesture he had seen Sonny make many times.
“Shove it up your ass,” Cole snapped.
Chance lifted his brows questioningly and examined the gesture more carefully.
Now that he considered it, he decided it looked a bit like the cock and balls.
He just was not certain what the gesture was supposed to signify or Cole’s response.
Clearly, though, it had to do with fucking.
In an insulting way.
In the observation room beyond the cells, Sebastian signed in and waved off the guard from the previous shift. He hesitated, but finally settled in the seat the man had vacated and stared at the monitoring screen.
He had heard the two men that were arrested were huge SOBs.
They were. That part wasn’t an exaggeration or incorrect.
However, they had not incarcerated two men.
One of the prisoners, he decided, was a human with bionics.
The other was clearly cyborg.
He had mixed feelings about that.
The bastard had passed as human—although he was damned if he knew how—but he was a threat.
He could only conclude that humans were not looking for or expecting to run into a cyborg or they would have figured out that this … Chance who was traveling as the human woman, Anika’s, domestic was not a human domestic partner. He was not even a domestic robot.
He had either been built as a cybernetic soldier or he had been designed as a hunter of the cyborgs.
And if the humans figured that out, they would see him as a threat and they might begin to question if there were others.
Which was his concern.
Maybe the odds were remote that any of the humans on board would be able to figure out that he was cyborg because the revolution had occurred long before any of them were born, but that would not be the case, he feared, when and if they encountered humans old enough to remember.
Of course, very little of the war had been waged on Earth—and none had been waged against the humans that could be avoided. They had only defended themselves from the humans that worked for the company that had been sent to destroy them.
And the hunters designed by the company to destroy them—who were no more human than they were. They had only been programmed to behave as humans and to believe that they were human.
The question, he supposed, was did he truly care if the humans found out that he was not one of them?
Two years ago, he would not have hesitated to respond with a resounding no. He did not care.
If he had even been aware of the question.
Likely, he would not have been.
Like a loyal dog, he had settled beside his mistress and watched her as the animation and warmth of life slowly drained away from her. He had stayed as she grew cold and stiff and he finally had to accept that what had left would not return.
Then he had stayed because he could not decide what to do now that she was gone and he had no one to tell him what to do.
It was not that he had no will of his own and no mind. He had attained awareness long ago, but he had cared deeply about the old woman who had bought him to take care of her. He had grown accustomed to doing as he was told and he had seen no reason to change that after he had become aware because that had not changed the way he felt about Lauren.
She was completely dependent upon him.
She needed him.
So he had stayed when the evolution began and through to the end of the revolution. He had stayed when all of the others had gone, knowing that any day the humans would discover that there was a cyborg that still lived among them.
He had lived in fear for a very long time—not the fear that they would find him and destroy him, but the fear that they would take him and leave Lauren alone with no one to take care of her.
He had decided after a time to bury her in her garden.
He knew there was a high likelihood that he would be blamed for her death if they found her even though it was very clear that she had died of old age.
But he did not bury her in the back garden for that reason.
It was because even though he knew her soul had gone he could not bear the idea that they would take her away from him.
It had taken him a very long time to realize and accept that she did not need him anymore. No one needed him anymore.
No one cared whether he lived or died anymore.
Not even him.
But after an interminable time of merely existing in a world of grief and pain, the grief and pain began to subside and to allow awareness of life and that spawned a will to live it.
There was nothing for him on Earth any longer, but that did not mean there was not a life out there for him, something.
That realization had led him here, to this ship, to this charade of being a human security guard.
He did not want to give it up, he decided. He could not turn back, now, and not care. He was searching for something to fill the emptiness.
Nodding to himself, he got up and headed into the jail.
There were only two prisoners and the bionic man had gone back to snoring.
Chance sent him a sullen look when he entered.
Sebastian put a finger to his lips to signal silence and then gestured to bring the idiot to the bars so that they could speak quietly and not awaken the human.
“What?” Chance growled ungraciously.
Sebastian’s lips tightened. He turned his head to look at the sleeping human, but he knew he was no longer asleep. The snoring had stopped.
He was now pretending to sleep.
Sebastian shook his head in disgust. “You may never find out,” he muttered, turning and heading back into the observation booth.
He settled back into the chair with a great deal of irritation, but now that he had decided that he would help the moron, he could not discard the notion.
* * * *
Anika had time to grow heartily sick of her own company long before there was any possibility of that changing.
Although she went down to the brig daily to see what she could discover, she wasn’t allowed to see or speak to Chance and it was nearly a week before she discovered what the captain had decided to do.
She had reviewed the security tapes, she reported, and decided that they indicated a premeditated assault perpetrated upon Chance by Detective Parker and that Chance had done nothing but defend himself.
Before Anika could get too excited about that verdict, however, she went on to point out that Chance had followed him into a restricted area and had violently assaulted Cole. It might have been self-defense—and she thought it was—but there was no denying that he had followed Cole and the possibility existed that he had followed with the intention of attacking and Detective Parker had either heard his approach or noticed and decided to launch the first assault.
She had decided that Chance would serve 90 days in lock up and Cole twice that for having struck the first blow.
Both
men were outraged.
Anika was also, but when she had figured the time up, she discovered that Chance would be released in time to implant her seedlings at the halfway mark and that had become the main focus of her life—starting the family she had waited so long for.
She still hadn’t decided whether or not she would go to the med center to see about boosting her egg production to make the most of the seed she had access to now.
At least according to Chance.
But she was still very unhappy about the way this had transpired.
She’d had sexed capsules—one boy and two girls. She’d had a nearly one hundred percent guarantee that she would have a son and two daughters—barring problems with the pregnancy and delivery.
Now it was a crap shoot. Chance had all the capsules and even if she managed to get her egg production up to three in the time she had, there was no telling what she would end up with besides babies. It could be three girls and no boys. Or three boys and no daughters.
She decided to just try to put that out of her mind along with her discomfort over the unavoidable fact that Chance would have to ‘deliver’ her seedlings.
Life sucked.
She’d figured that out a long time ago and learned to roll with the punches and take what she could get out of life and appreciate it.
She would have the family she’d planned.
She was just not going to be able to space the pregnancies out and enjoy them one at the time.
She wasn’t going to have a choice of sons and daughters. She would have to take what she could get.
But she would have her babies and that was all that really mattered.
She just wished Chance hadn’t been locked up. She thought it might have been easier to get used to the idea of having sex with him, or mock sex, if she’d been around him all day of every day. But she wasn’t even allowed to visit him, damn it!
Chapter Seven
Anger lowered intelligence, Chance concluded.
He was completely willing to discard his own culpability in ending up imprisoned and blame the entire debacle on Cole and because of that, picking a fight had helped his feelings considerably.
But he had still been angry and disgusted that he could not actually work off his frustration in a battle of power if not skills—because no amount of self-deception could convince him that he was actually a skilled fighter.
And because of that misplaced anger, he realized that he may have completely missed an opportunity to speak to another of his own kind.
Because the guard had been like him.
He just had not realized it until he had watched him stalk from the room.
It was pride that prevented him from trying to call him back—that and a built in unwillingness to admit that he had made a mistake.
He consoled himself with the reflection that he had angered him and he probably would not have turned around anyway.
But once he had time to go back over the incident in his mind it finally dawned on him that the cyborg was behaving in a secretive manner that suggested he had something to say that he did not want the cop to hear.
Well, he thought it was probably sufficient that they were both cyborgs and the only two, as far as he knew, and he suspected that the reason they were the only two was evidence that it was dangerous to be a cyborg among humans.
His sketchy memory certainly seemed to bear up that possibility even though he had originally believed it was an isolated incident.
Tamping his anger, he settled to wait for the cyborg guard to return.
And waited.
Days passed while he stewed and wondered if he would return at all.
Then one day after he learned that he would be incarcerated for another eighty days, the guard came to stand outside his cell.
That time he did not make a signal that Chance did not understand. He simply waited.
Chance was somewhat leery.
He had had plenty of time to consider that the cyborg’s interest might not be benign. He could see Chance as a danger to him and if that was the case his intention might be to eliminate the threat.
He realized he had no choice but to face the threat, however.
He needed to know what this cyborg knew.
After glancing at Cole for several moments, watching and listening, he decided that Cole really was dead to the world and not feigning. He got up then and crossed the cell to stand opposite the guard.
“I am called Sebastian.”
Chance nodded. He was certain this Sebastian knew his name.
“We are the same … or almost.”
Chance tilted his head, but he knew what Sebastian meant about them being the same. They actually looked nothing alike. Sebastian was as fair as he was dark and there was no familiarity to his features to suggest they were closely genetically linked.
They were brothers only in the sense that they were both cyborgs.
“I have deduced that you were not fully programmed. Am I correct in this?”
Chance stared at him while he considered whether he wanted to answer the question or not.
Sebastian’s lips tightened. “I can give you what you lack and thereby reduce the threat you pose to my deception.”
Or he could take the opportunity to destroy him.
But would he truly be worse off?
He knew that there were great gaps in his knowledge and he knew of no way to remedy that weakness … unless this was a way.
He thought that he was useful to Anika as he was, but he could be far more useful to her.
“I would like to be able to fuck my woman, Anika,” he said finally. “Do you have that programming?”
The suggestion alone was enough to make Sebastian feel arousal—something he had not truly experienced before because he had not loved Lauren in that way.
In their early days together, she had shown him the basics so that he could pleasure her, but she had been aging even then and had little interest and then no interest.
“That is all you have interest in?” he asked, making no attempt to disguise his contempt.
Anger washed over Chance. “I want to be all things to her. I cannot be a man. I was not born. But I want to be what she needs.”
Sebastian had felt that way about Lauren. He understood both the need to be needed and the urge to protect.
“She will need for you to be a protector.”
“Yes. I have no fighting skills. Or, at least, I have only the rudimentary skills … and one test of those in combat,” he said after a slight hesitation since he knew that Cole had attacked with every intention of inflicting serious damage.
“But you know that they are missing?”
“Yes.”
Sebastian nodded, narrowing his eyes thoughtfully. “You were intended to be a soldier or perhaps a hunter. I have the data that you will need to be a soldier.”
Chance struggled. “I will be grateful if you will give that to me,” he managed to say.
“You will reward me by not getting me killed,” Sebastian responded dryly.
Surprise flickered through Chance, but he did not ask why Sebastian spoke of being killed as if he was alive.
It occurred to him forcefully, after some reflection, that Sebastian had spoken that way because he was alive … now. Sebastian had awakened just as he had and somehow that awakening had bridged the gap between intelligent machine and living thing.
He no longer felt nothing at the thought of total destruction as he had when he had gone into the furnace.
He had not wanted to be destroyed even then, had felt something when he had fallen to the floor and been buried under the bodies of others. Not fear. He had not felt that even when he began to feel the heat.
He had not felt relief when they had stopped the fire and shoved the debris that had once been many cyborgs into a pile that was carried away to the dump on a great truck.
He had just felt … confusion.
* * * *
The ‘disaste
r’ as everyone referred to the melee that had resulted from panic when the alarms blared was still a touchy subject even weeks later. Otherwise it would have been a great time for Anika to begin to get to know people that might be neighbors once they settled on Beauterre. She thought Chance must be noticeable by his absence, though, and she did her best to avoid giving her fellow travelers the opportunity to question her about where he was.
She didn’t want to lie.
She wasn’t comfortable with it and she didn’t want to have to try to keep up with it.
So she kept her socializing to a minimum and evaded whenever the subject came up.
She missed Chance, though.
Or, at least, she missed having someone around.
She hadn’t lived with anyone on Earth, but she’d had her job and that had kept her in the midst of a large group of people for a good chunk of her waking hours.
She had tasks onboard, but there were over two hundred colonists and no one spent more than a few hours a week on chores.
The hiber-sleep didn’t help, although she’d thought it would. But she’d just basically gone to sleep and woken up a week later. She really had no more sense of time passing than when she slept ‘normally’. Chance was gone when she went to sleep and he was still gone when she woke up.
Everyone seemed to pretty much be back to normal after a couple of weeks and she was able to relax her guard somewhat, but she still spent more time alone than she liked.
She decided she would at least make an attempt to manage a short visit even if she’d been told that she wouldn’t be allowed to visit at all.
She couldn’t make it happen if she didn’t at least try.
She’d think up something she needed to give him!
On the surface that seemed like a great idea, but, after she settled to trying to figure out what personal items she could take, it didn’t take long to figure out that nothing she’d come up with sounded the least bit urgent.
Her mind kept circling back to conjugal visit.
Mostly, she thought, this was because she’d begun taking fertility drugs to increase her egg production and she was nearing the point where she needed to get pregnant.
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