She saw when she glanced at them that they were staring at her blankly in confusion. “Sex,” she clarified wryly. “I’d done a little messing around, but nothing much. Honestly, it was so awkward I wasn’t really comfortable with it. Anyway, I didn’t and I sure as hell wasn’t interested in any of the other crewmembers on board the ship. Take my word for it! Total creeps and nasty! So one day Pops gets drunk as a coot and asks me about it. Mind you, I was twenty at the time, and he finally gets around to talking sex education!” She shook her head. “Good old Pops! I’d pretty much figured it all out by then, of course. I just hadn’t had any experience. So I’m thinking Pops has forgotten all about it by the time we hit another port, but, hell no! The first thing he does after we’ve processed the salvage and collected our money is insist that the two of us need to head down to a brothel and get our pipes cleaned!”
She shrugged. “I wasn’t really that comfortable about Pops suggesting it, but I wasn’t against the idea. He’d pretty much convinced me when we had the talk before that I couldn’t go wrong by going to a sexdroid the first time since they’re just—well! Anyway, so we get to the brothel and there’s this absolutelydivinecyborg sexdroid named Damon! And he didn’t just look yummy. He had all the right moves!
“I was stiff as a poker,” she added, laughing. “But he knew exactly what to do and not only did it not hurt—at all—but it was …. Well, it was just wonderful! It wasn’t at all like it was when I was a kid with the other kids. No slobbering or groping. He kissed dreamy and … everything else. I enjoyed myself so much I didn’t want to leave,” she said, chuckling, “I tried my best to talk the owner into selling him to me, but the dip-shit wouldn’t go for it.
“Pops laughed his ass off that I’d gotten so … attached to him, but I sure as hell hated to leave him. Said I took to sex like a duck to water … whatever that is.”
She hadn’t expected it to depress her to tell them the story. She’d thought it was funny—sort of—and it would lighten the mood. There was no getting around the fact that ithaddepressed her, though.
“I was fully programmed to perform as a sexdroid,” Jared said after a fairly lengthy pause.
Kane frowned at him when he said nothing else and finally turned to her. “I was also.”
Chloe looked at both cyborgs with surprise. “No shit?”
“I am not shitting you,” Jared assured her, his expression earnest. “It would not be difficult to access the programming, although I have not had occasion to use it before.”
Chloe studied both cyborgs speculatively, discovering with more than a little surprise that she hadn’t noticed how handsome they were. Not that they were as handsome as Damon, but they were a sight better looking than any man she’d ever seen—real man—not that she’d seen a lot since she was old enough to actually notice. There didn’t seem to be many good looking men in the salvage business and the men at the bars—well, the best looking ones were usually pirates!
The weird thing was that she hadn’t actually noticed Jared or Kane, not really. It didn’t take a lot of searching to figure that out. It had been painful to look at them when they’d first recovered them. She’d gotten into the habit ofnotlooking at them, not directly. She knew, of course, that they were amazingly tall and brawny. That sort of went with the territory, though. At least, she figured it did, that the company had gone out of their way to create soldiers that were intimidating in size alone. They didn’t actually need to. They could’ve been half the size they were and they still would’ve been stronger and faster than any human counterpart, but they wouldn’t havelookedas intimidating.
Now that they’d drawn it to her attention, though, she actually studied them.
Jared was almost ‘pretty boy’ handsome in the face—without a sign of a scar despite the fact that most of one cheek had been missing when they’d pulled him off that frozen planet. It made her belly clench just remembering it.
His hair had grown, but she thought the shoulder length, dark hair sort of set off his almost classical features and, truthfully, she’d never liked the short hair the military favored.
Kane was more rugged looking, but attractive in a very manly way. With his black hair and olive complexion, he reminded her strongly of pictures she’d seen in her study data of the ‘wild natives’ discovered on the North American continent on Earth in ancient times.
For a handful of moments, she tried to imagine herself locked into the sort of embrace that she’d enjoyed with Damon, but although it stirred a lot of warmth—alright carnal heat—it also made her feel a little uncomfortable. Images wafted through her mind of Jared and Kane as they’d looked when her and her father had found them, though, and she abruptly knew why. One part of her knew they were just machines, that they couldn’tbeabused in the sense that a living thing could, and yet she had been so angry at their condition at the time—still was—and ashamed that their government was responsible for the horrors she and her father had seen. It made her feel guilty even to consider taking further advantage of them. It just wasn’t right. She didn’t care if they were supposed to be nothing but machines. They looked and acted human and that was enough to make the government’s negligence heinous. In point of fact, there’d been human soldiers among them that had suffered the same fate, although she hadn’t known it at the time. She didn’t like to think about the incident—at all—because in the back of her mind she’d had this terrible fear ever since that they’d left someone that might have been saved if they’d only kept looking. She forced a chuckle. “Hey! Thanks, guys, but don’t access it on my account! I’m pretty sure I’ve got zero sex drive. I hadn’t even thought of having sex since ….”
Chloe broke off abruptly as a sudden thought hit her like a rogue meteor. Her eyes widened and she jolted up from her chair, upsetting the game board in the process. “Oh my god! Damon! Total recall! Oh my god! That means they’ll be recalling Damon! He’s an S series. I’m sure he was!”
She tried to tell herself that it wasn’t likely that they really meant to recallallof the cyborgs, but panic gripped her and she couldn’t shake the thought that he was even now being packed up to be shipped back to the company. “He wouldn’t let them take Damon,” she muttered to herself as she dashed to the ship’s console. “Damon was the only male sexdroid the proprietor had. He wouldn’t letmebuy him, damn it! There’s no way he’d turn him over.”
She glanced toward Jared and Kane. “What do they do when they recall cyborgs—droids?”
Jared’s lips had formed a tight line. “Disassemble.”
“Disassemble!” Chloe practically shouted. “Oh my god! Well, I’ve got to go after him! That’s all there is to it!”
Her hands were shaking when she pulled up a map and began to search for Thagorous. “System, system …! Shit! I can’t remember the name of the god damned system! Shit! Shit! Shit! Computer! Bring me up a list of planets named Thagorous and their star systems!”
“You are going there?”
Chloe threw a distracted glance in the general direction of the voice and realized both Jared and Kane had followed her. “Of course I’m going there … wherever …. That’s it! The Medaly Galaxy, Osirus system! Computer! Calculate a jump to this coordinate.”
“From what point of origin?”
“This point you dumb shit!” Chloe snapped. “Honest to god! Computers and their stupid questions.” She glanced up at Jared and Kane a little self-consciously. “I meant the computer-computer, not you guys.”
“Why are we going there?” Kane asked.
Alright. So Kane could be pretty fucking dense! “Damon?”
“We cannot make that jump,” Jared said tightly.
“From this point of origin, it would require three jumps,” the computer announced.
