Cyborg Nation Kaitlyn O'Connor (books to get back into reading TXT) 📖

lifted her head to look down at herself but discovered she was covered with the blanket. She knew, though, that her leg was broken, as well. They’d realigned the bone and braced her leg with something.

She looked up at Jerico and Gabriel, feeling a mixture of gratitude and something else that was difficult to pin down. They’d saved her life—and Gideon. He was the one who’d thought to try to give her their nanos—because he hadn’t been able to bring himself to try to use the laser to close the wound.

Finally, offering them a smile since she couldn’t speak for the knot of emotion closing her throat, she took the food Jerico was offering. It was some sort of bread. Gabriel lifted her head and propped something soft beneath it and she pulled off a small piece and chewed it carefully. It wasn’t easy trying to eat flat on her back, but then she wasn’t that hungry anyway.

“We will stay close. If you have need of anything, keep your voice low. We will hear you and come.” Setting the cup he’d brought with him within her reach, Jerico rose and left her. After flicking a gaze over her assessingly, Gabriel straightened and followed him and the two of them returned to sifting through the wreckage.

She watched them while she struggled to swallow as much of the food and water as she could, trying to piece everything together in her mind.

Something had hit the craft, something pretty big to have damaged it as badly as it had, a meteor undoubtedly, though she wondered how it had gotten so close before the proximity alarm had sounded. The system wouldn’t have warned them at all if had been malfunctioning, she didn’t suppose, but there most have been something wrong with the detection range. Either that or something had caused the meteor to abruptly change course.

They hadn’t gotten the chance to get out a call for help because the collision had destroyed communications.

That explained why they were still here. The command center had to know, though, that the ship had been damaged. Surely they would be looking? Surely they would’ve been able to track the descent at least part of the way and have some idea of their general location?

Unless they thought the ship had been destroyed?

She dismissed the fear that caused her. Gideon, Jerico, and Gabriel would take care of her. Despite their rowdiness in general, it hadn’t escaped her that the moment there was a threat, they’d instantly responded with cool headed military precision and they’d managed to get the craft on the ground without killing everyone on board. As little as she knew about piloting a craft, she knew that had been a hell of a feat in and of itself. They’d had almost no control over it, had had to improvise the usage of what they had left in ways it had never been intended.

They might be flawed in a lot of ways, but she could not have been in better hands in the situation they were in.

It was almost with surprise that she realized that she had absolute faith, not only in their abilities but in their dedication to taking care of her.

The thing that worried her was that she was the one element in the equation that could bring about disaster. If they’d been acting strictly on logic, they would’ve realized that. Her injuries and her human weaknesses were a threat to their survival. True, they’d been badly injured, too, but they were not only many times stronger than even the strongest humans, they had nanos to help them recover many times faster from the severest injuries.

She hadn’t needed Gideon to tell her how hard it was to kill one of them. They were virtually indestructible. As long as they could prevent themselves from getting so much damage so fast that their nanos couldn’t repair them quickly enough, and their speed, strength, and agility insured that, they couldn’t under most circumstances. The crash might be the closest they’d ever come to reaching critical threat—certainly would have been if the trogs had been close enough to attack before they’d had a little time to recover.

Without her to worry about, they could’ve been far away by now.

Instead, knowing there was a threat out there, they were forced to wait until they thought it safe to move her.

Or they had chosen to wait.

She wondered if that was because of their orders to protect her or if personal choice had figured in to it at all, but she didn’t want to examine that too closely. She wanted to think at least a part of it had been because it mattered to them, that she mattered to them.

The threat could only be indigenous life, probably primitive, which also probably translated to dangerous savages. Gideon had been in touch with the command center before they’d lost communications. This had to be their destination world, and yet they’d gone down beyond the civilization the Cyborgs had created, a very long way, otherwise they would have seen some sign of a rescue party by now and Gideon and the others wouldn’t be worried about being attacked.

They weren’t worried for their own sake, she realized. They were concerned about protecting her if there was an attack.

If they were concerned for themselves, Gideon wouldn’t have gone off alone, virtually unarmed, and Gabriel and Jerico wouldn’t have been standing guard over her completely unarmed except for whatever makeshift weapons they could grab up.

Which meant she was even more of a threat to their safety. They were not only going to be slowed by her, they were very likely going to be forced into a confrontation because of her, possibly by overwhelming numbers and very likely by savages better armed than they were. Weakened and injured as she was, she knew it could take her weeks or months to recover, even with the help of their nanos—if she ever completely recovered from it.

And she couldn’t dismiss the fact that the