The Lawgivers: Gabriel Page 27

  He knew, abruptly, what he was going to have to do if he and Lexa were to have any chance together. Nothing, he realized was worth risking losing Lexa. He had a chance, finally, to have a family and he wasn’t going to throw that chance away.

  “I won’t leave you long,” he said slowly. “I have to resign my post as lawgiver. It might take a few days to get through all the paperwork, but then I’ll return for you and we’ll find a place to build our own homestead … if that’s what you want?”

  Lexa was still torn. She’d told herself that she wouldn’t fail her siblings again, but as she stared unhappily at Kyle she realized that she had still been thinking of them as the little children she’d left. They weren’t children anymore and they’d made it clear that they controlled their own destinies, made their own decisions. They had already decided. She didn’t know how they’d come to that place of hate, but she was a virtual stranger to them now—just as they were to her. They weren’t going to listen to her as they had as children. They didn’t trust her anymore. She wouldn’t be throwing away a chance of happiness with Gabriel for them. She’d just be throwing it away for nothing—and she’d probably still lose them—or not. It wasn’t something in her power to change, though. And truthfully, she didn’t think she could bear losing Gabriel when he was offering her what she’d wanted for so long.

  Guilt overshadowed the happiness Gabriel’s offer had given her, but then she’d learned in life lessons that happiness was usually leavened with a healthy dose of painful reality—which made it something to be treasured. Only a fool would throw away such a rare and wonderful gift, selfish or not.

  And she didn’t have to give up on her brothers and sister. Gabriel had already said he would bring her to visit them. Maybe, in time, they would come around and she would still have a chance to have both Gabriel and her siblings, but she knew Kyle was right. Nothing she could say or do at this point was going to change anything. “You won’t be a lawgiver anymore?”

  He smiled faintly. “I guess I’ll be a farmer. Damned if I’ve got any idea how to do it, but I’ll figure it out.”

  Lexa smiled at him. “We will figure it out.”

  * * * *

  Gah-re-al grimaced. “My ears are ringing,” he muttered. “Healthy lungs, that one.”

  Lexa elbowed him in the ribs. “They might hear you!” she hissed.

  Gah-re-al uttered a disbelieving snort. “Not over the racket that little monster was making!”

  She sent him a disapproving look, unconsciously lifting her hand to the mound her belly had become. “I suppose you’ll think ours is a monster, too?”

  Gah-re-al gaped at her for a moment in dismay, not the least because it almost seemed like she’d read his mind and knew he was worried about that very thing—wondering if he was going to be able to handle having a squalling infant in the same house—well, stay in the same house. He didn’t doubt that if anybody was going it was going to be him. “I didn’t say that.”

  “They only cry when they need something,” she said. “It isn’t like they can tell you … any other way, I mean.”

  Gah-re-al nodded, but he didn’t know a damned thing about it. “You sure you want to walk to our place? It’s a long way.”

  “And you’re worried about me.”

  He frowned. “I was just thinking it might be too much for you. I don’t want you to drop it or anything.”

  “I’m not even six months into my pregnancy! I’m not going to drop it along the way,” Lexa said a little indignantly. “They don’t just fall out! It takes a hell of a lot of work to push them out.”

  Gah-re-al felt a little queasy. He’d been trying damned hard not to think about that part. “I didn’t mean it that way,” he said indignantly.

  “What did you mean then?”

  He was damned if he knew!

  Lexa glanced at his sullen expression a couple of times as they walked along the narrow trail that connected their homestead to Raphael and Claire’s. “You were thinking I might be too tired to fuck when we got there,” she said bluntly.

  Gah-re-al felt his face redden. She was getting way too good at reading him and the hell of it was he didn’t know how she did it! “It didn’t cross my mind,” he muttered.

  She laughed, but there was just a touch of a sarcastic edge to it. He nursed his feelings of ill usage for a few moments, but he knew if they were still at odds when they got back he wasn’t getting any. He managed to curl his lips in a semblance of a smile. “Really. It didn’t. But I could be persuaded.”

  Her laugh that time was more genuine. “Supper will be late.”

  “I can wait.”

  Lexa stopped abruptly and moved closer. Looping her arms around his neck, she grinned at him. “I’m not sure I can. I’m starving. You’d better fly us there.”

  Gah-re-al wrestled with himself. “We don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

  “Hmmm. That depends.”

  “On what?” he asked cautiously.

  “Are we going to fuck? Or make love?”

  Gah-re-al stared at her a long moment, knowing getting what he wanted hinged on saying the right thing. Then again, he knew what the right thing was. “I always make love to you.”

  “Smart man!” Lexa said with a chuckle.

  Gah-re-al studied her for a long moment and finally lifted a hand to caress her cheek. “I do love you, Lexa. You know that, don’t you?”

  Lexa blushed with pleasure. “I’ll give you an hour to convince me.”

  “Just an hour?” he asked, laughing.

  “Oh you’ll be lucky to hold out that long!”

  “Ah! A challenge! I love a good challenge.”

  The End.

  Read an excerpt from Kaitlyn O’Connors’ latest book in her popular cyborg series, available soon through KK&M LLC and their distributors.

  Cyberevolution:

  The Awakening

  By

  Kaitlyn O’Connor

  Chapter One

  There was no question about the precise moment the drop ship entered the planet’s atmosphere. The troop carrier began to shimmy. The vibrations increased exponentially as they dropped lower until it reached a point where it felt like it would liquefy flesh, bones, and teeth, and everything around them would disintegrate. Then the transport began to buck wildly. Abruptly, an explosion ripped a hole in the hull wide enough to suck three troopers and their seats out of it.

  Something strange happened when it did. Seth felt his motor functions slow in a most peculiar way. Logically, he knew that the hull breach, the flying shrapnel that peppered every troop close enough to catch a projectile, the screams, the flying bits of flesh and metal that resulted from the impact of the projectiles, and the abrupt extraction of one entire row of seats and their occupants created by the opposing forces of interior pressure and exterior occurred almost simultaneously. He also knew that his processor was fast enough to record all of those nearly instantaneous occurrences.

  Time seemed to slow, however. He blinked, heard a strange roaring sound that did not seem to be related to the hull breach—because it occurred milliseconds prior to that—and then he saw everything that happened in a series of stills. As if he was experiencing a complete system failure due to faulty, failing power supply, he saw the hole simply appear, the darkness beyond as profound as deep space although he knew it was simply the dark side of the world below them. He saw the stunned expressions on the faces of the three troops that were sucked out as they flew backwards in their safety harnesses and vanished in the black abyss.

  Panning right, he saw the troops who had been seated beside them turn their heads very slowly toward the hole and the strange, disjointed dance several others performed as holes appeared in their bodies and chunks of flesh, blood, and pieces of metal slowly jetted from them.

  It was more than a slowing of his visual perception, however. He could not seem to process what he had recorded. He felt oddly blank which became even more strange when he realized he
had not simply shut down.

  This was a very strange system failure indeed.

  Particularly when he felt a rush of something completely incomprehensible fill the odd void.

  Abruptly, his heart rate shot upward and he felt his body tingle with cold as if an electric current had sizzled along his exterior, penetrating all the way to his biological organs nestled in the armor of his chassis. And then time, his motor functions, seemed to abruptly right themselves and everything was happening simultaneously around him, too quickly to process.

  He strained against his safety harness to twist his head around enough to assess his team leader, Danika. She was staring at the hole, her blue eyes wide, her face as pale as death, her lips parted slightly. The frozen look on her face sent a shaft of … something through Seth, making his heart jar in his chest, as if it had lost its rhythm.

  “Danika! Are you alright? Were you hit?”

  She sent him a startled look, which sent another inexplicable tide of something unidentifiable twisting through Seth. She had not ceased to function—was not dead, he corrected himself.

  She blinked a couple of times and then looked down at herself as if she could not assess her condition without a visual—and her hands. She patted her torso and then looked at him again. “Damage report,” she demanded abruptly.

  It was at that point that it occurred to Seth that he had not executed a damage report despite the fact that he had noted that his systems were performing in a very erratic way. He frowned and looked down at himself as she had. When he looked at her again, he saw that she was looking at him strangely. He felt the temperature of the flesh of his face heat inexplicably and a strange flutter in his belly, as if he had swallowed something alive that was still moving. “All systems fully operational. No damage.”

  She studied him several moments more and Seth felt a fluctuation of heat and cold that seemed to be a reaction to her close scrutiny. Finally, she dismissed him and flicked a glance at the other two squad members. “Dane—Niles—damage report.”

  “All systems fully functional. Minor anterior damage to torso,” Niles responded. “The shrapnel did not penetrate beyond biological sheathing. Nanos performing repair. Estimated repair time … one hour to complete.”

  “Mobility impaired,” Dane replied. “Extensive damage to pneumatic knee joint. Nanos affecting repairs. Estimated repair time six hours. Minor damage to biological sheathing in three locations—right knee, right calf, right arm—estimated repair time 45 minutes, 13 seconds.”

  “Fuck!” Danika exclaimed. “Patch the suits! We’re on the dark side and looking at well below zero temperatures. Can you make the jump, Niles?”

  “Affirmative—disregarding more damage prior to reaching the jump altitude.”

  Since several more missiles had exploded in close proximity to the drop ship during the course of the systems checks, Seth thought the probability of more damage was high. He considered pointing that out until it occurred to him that Danika hadn’t requested the information. That realization sent him into even more confusion. Unable to dismiss the suspicion that he had sustained some sort of damage, he ran another systems check. Again, his systems report was negative. Unconvinced despite that, he lifted one hand and examined his head, wondering if a microscopic fragment had penetrated his skull and damaged his CPU.

  His squad leader noticed the movement and the examination. “Is there a problem, Seth?”

  The odd fluctuation of hot and cold flooded him again. “Negative.” The realization that he had just lied struck Seth forcefully. He had informed his squad leader that he was fully functional and could detect no damage when in fact he suspected that his entire system was malfunctioning.

  He was no longer recording internal and external events, he realized after considering the problem for some moments. He was … feeling.

  That discovery … unnerved him. He could not think of another way to describe the strange hot/cold fluctuation, the tightening sensation in his gut, or the erratic rhythm of his heart. He dismissed that possibility and examined the events he had noted since the drop and determined that he could track the anomaly back to the precise instant the exploding missile had ruptured the hull of their drop ship—or rather an instant prior to that. There had been a roaring sound, like the rush of air, almost as if he had anticipated the rupture of the hull.

  He had not heard the sound with his ears, though. It had been inside his brain—the biological part—not the CPU.

  Anger swept through him—not the perception of an event that might cause anger or the reaction he had been programmed to exhibit upon such an occurrence. He felt it.

  The biological brain he had been given was defective!

  “Bail out! Bail! Bail! Bail!” the co-pilot, a human, abruptly roared over the com-unit.

  Niles and even Dane had thrown off their safety harnesses and were on their feet before the human had issued the order the second time. Brought abruptly from his internal examination, Seth was still a few seconds behind them due his preoccupation.

  Danika, he discovered, was still trying to free herself from her safety harness. He reached down, pushed her hands aside, and depressed the lock release. She flicked a look of surprise at him and then glared. Shoving his hands away, she tossed the harness off and stood with an effort.

  Then promptly fell back into her seat.

  Grasping a handful of her suit, Seth hauled her to her feet again, trying to help her steady herself on the rolling, bucking deck.

  “Line up to bail!” she bellowed.

  He obeyed, hauling her around until she was in front of him, wedged between his belly and Dane’s back. They shuffled toward the gaping maw of the drop ramp that had been opened, fighting the rocking of the ship and the buffeting wind.

  “Oh my god!” Danika exclaimed. “What the fuck are they thinking? I can’t make this jump!”

  The wind whipped her voice away, but Seth had gotten close enough to gauge the distance to the ground, as well, and his calculations substantiated hers. The drop was too far for a human to manage without sustaining debilitating damage. He wrapped an arm around Danika and stepped off of the platform, allowing his legs to absorb the shock as they landed.

  He discovered he had miscalculated having had insufficient data to correctly assess the snow pack. His considerable weight and the distance, combined with Danika’s added weight, resulted in him landing with sufficient force that he was driven waist deep into the ice below. He released her as he felt himself sinking and she landed on the softer pack of the surface with a grunt as the air was forced from her lungs.

  A projectile struck Seth in the shoulder while he was assessing the situation and calculating the best way to free himself. A dozen more peppered the ground around Seth and Danika, throwing up fountains of snow as they furrowed.

  Dimly, Seth was aware of alarm at the danger Danika was in, fully exposed and lying on the top of the soft pack, snow camo or not. Peripherally, he was aware that the entire battalion was taking heavy fire from nearly every direction. He was mostly focused, however, on the pain that had exploded in his shoulder and filled his mind as the projectile tore through the biological sheathing of his shoulder.

  He had never experienced pain before. He was so stunned by the reaction, in point of fact, that it took him many moments to comprehend what it was. There should have been nothing more than an alert of damage—followed by a damage report!

  The second projectile that cut a burning path along the same arm finally shook him from his preoccupation with the intense new sensations and forced him to focus on avoiding more pain. After pushing ineffectually against the shifting snow for a few moments, he finally pushed the upper portion of his body downward since he couldn’t pull his knees up and used the force to propel himself upward.

  He landed face down near his squad leader. Crawling forward, he managed to form a protective shield on one side. “Dane! Niles! To the squad leader! Form a barrier.”

  He discovered Danika
was gaping at him when he focused on her, trying to assess damage—or if she had damage.

  “Getting my squad shot all to shit isn’t going to help me!” she growled.

  Their com units squawked. “Forward squads! Lay down a suppressing fire. Rear squads fall back!”

  “Shit!” Danika responded to the abrupt command that squawked over their com units. “We were last to drop. That makes us forward, damn it. Get your weapons up, squad! Fire! Fire! Fire!”

  Reflecting that he could still shield her with his body facing away from her, Seth rolled away from her and unshouldered his weapon. To his relief, his malfunction didn’t seem to extend to his ability to calculate the trajectory of the projectiles flying at them. Unfortunately, also by his calculations, his own weapon range fell short of the enemy’s. Ignoring the lack of logic in firing on an enemy he could not hit in favor of the orders given, he zeroed in on a target and fired.