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  “Reina, I can train you. Help ease you into the power you have. I don’t think you are aware of the scope of what you can do.”

  She looked at him, then at her hand. “What can I do?”

  “You can control this ship. When I was inside you...I’m sorry, that sounds very sexual.” He snickered as a blush ghosted her cheeks. “You are wired with the same abilities as any Cyborg.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

  “Give me weapons access and I’ll show you.”

  Atlas watched her face turn to stone then fall apart, harried by his lack of encouragement, lack of any support or training whatsoever.

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “You will allow me to protect us.”

  “I’ve never needed anyone before you, any man, and I don’t need one now,” she bit out.

  “Reina, I’m not just a man. I’m a Cyborg, a conscious intelligence, who desperately wants to do his job.” He hesitated before adding, “And keep you safe.”

  She turned around to face him with her beautifully lackadaisical hair tumbling around her shoulders. “My arm is back to normal,” she hissed at him. “To answer your original question.”

  REINA DIDN’T KNOW WHAT to do.

  The beautiful, ethereal Cyborg who towered over her made her question everything, and she secretly hated him for it.

  The worst part about it was that she wanted to give him access. In fact, she wanted to give him whatever he wanted. Maybe because she didn’t want anything herself, and she could live through him. A being who was no longer alive.

  But he was also a being who invaded her dreams, who tugged and pulled at every nerve ending within her.

  There was more to her implant than she was aware of; there was power that could be had. Reina didn’t think the Council had remained quiet about the extent of her abilities. Maybe it was that she hadn’t quite grasped the magnitude of what the half-billion dollar robotic piece could actually do?

  Why not give him weapons access?

  “You don’t think I could protect us?” She had to know.

  “I think that I could do a better job. I was trained for battle. You can give me weapons and still maintain all reporting. You can even log it into the military archives. You can still take everything you’ve given to me away, without a second thought.”

  “I don’t know...”

  He changed the subject, “How are you feeling, emotionally, besides your arm?”

  Atlas crowded her when she looked down at herself, looking at her body through the suit she wore. He looked at her the same way, and she remembered lying half naked in front of him. Vulnerable. He was just light and color but the way he moved was powerful enough to believe he was really there.

  She reached her hand out to touch him but thought better of it, tucking it in her hair instead.

  “I feel okay. I don’t feel as alone anymore, thanks to you.” Reina paused and looked toward the exit then back at him. “Have you seen the doctor?”

  “He is in the lab, below, studying the ship. Give me weapons access.” He wouldn’t let her change the subject.

  “No.”

  He wanted to rage and she knew it, looking at his incomplete form. “At least allow me access for internal security. I do not need ballistics. For now, I'll settle for the ability to protect you, you alone, and not the ship,” he sighed. “Even though protecting the ship would be protecting you.”

  “You want to protect me from myself?” she laughed, turning away from the stars to look at him.

  There was a long quiet before he answered. “I want to protect you from everything and that includes this ship.”

  He read her emotions, her face, every twitch she made, and knew he had won. Atlas watched her as she lifted her slender fingers to the screen before her and gave him access to their offensive and defensive systems. The excess power rushed out of her and into him, and barriers were broken down. Every allowance she gave solidified his claim over her. Reina knew it and she didn’t seem to mind.

  A strange electric sensation filled her, warming her skin, lighting her on fire. Atlas stood before her with a look of triumph beaming from his projection. Reina wanted to lose herself within his being and it hurt her all the more that the lust she felt would always be unrequited.

  She wanted him in an unknowable, unchecked way. She could feel his energy rush up her arm and into her head, feeling him in a way that was beyond human. And in those moments, Reina knew she could read him as well as he could read her. Penetrating his being in a way that was wrong and invasive.

  She wanted Atlas. And in some odd, confusing, way he wanted her too.

  “There. Are you happy?” She sat back down.

  “I am, Reina, thank you.” His body vanished.

  A blush rose to her cheeks and she looked around. “Atlas?”

  But he didn’t answer her, he was gone.

  REINA STOOD IN HER quarters that same evening feeling incredibly lost.

  She looked around the luxurious space and wanted nothing more than to have someone with her. To have Atlas’s beautiful, robotic body with her. Her heart wanted to burst with everything she felt, her legs wanted to wrap around his waist and ride him.

  She had never succumbed to someone so easily before. Seeing Atlas in his humanoid form did not help her situation at all. His voice was so warm and addictive that she did not need to see the body it belonged to, but now that she had, she was cursed.

  There were no strings attached.

  Her eyes turned to scan her room. No projection pieces throughout. She had checked thoroughly but the thought still surfaced. There were handheld ones she could bring in, but there was no real reason to.

  Reina turned toward the lavatory and stripped to take a shower. For a wanton minute, she hoped that Atlas could see her and that he was watching her, that there was some hidden piece of tech that she’d missed and that he had lied to her about her privacy. His safety was addicting: it was like an unbreachable firewall around her.

  But the lack of a physical body did nothing to soothe the strain between her legs, the tense hollow feeling that only a powerful man could fix, that only the crazy thrash of sex could cure. There was no other man on the ship but the odd doctor, and Reina would rather crash the flyer before she sought him out.

  Reina briefly tried to focus on the men in her past but they dried up like dust in her mind. Only the Cyborg remained.

  She stepped under the warm spray of soft water, feeling every stream slide down her heated skin. Her imagination ran wild with him in her mind. The strong muscles of his arms grasping her body, holding her up, pushing her down. She tweaked her nipples, running soapy hands over the tight peaks, rounding her breasts.

  Reina closed her eyes and lost herself in it.

  He stood behind her, towering, his long, steely hands groped her sensitive breasts and ground her body back into his. He whispered her name continuously into her ear all while sliding his impossibly large manhood between her legs. The large tip teasingly sought entrance to her backside, shallowly dipping in and out of her while his fingers rolled her tits. With each staggering penetration, her body would tense up, readying itself to be mounted.

  Each tease caused her to release a strangled gasp.

  “Would you like me to bend you over, Captain?” One of his hands reached up and grabbed her hair, tipping her head back sharply just as his large cock sank deeper into her. “Do you want to be mounted?” Teeth scraped her neck. “Do you want to be controlled?”

  Reina’s hands drifted between her legs and opened herself up, allowing the sloshing water to run over her hungry body. She rubbed her fingers over her clit roughly.

  “Yes,” she breathed into the steam, his hand sliding past her throat to squeeze her breast. “I need you.”

  He pushed her forward, and the soap and spray of the shower ran like wet, slick silk between their tense forms. Any moment she was going to burst v
iolently.

  “Say it again.”

  “I need you.” Her hands hit the wall.

  “Again.” His hard body covered her back as her legs were knocked apart.

  “Please, Atlas. I know you need me too.” Her eyes snapped open just as he thrust up into her hungry body, breaking her open.

  “Fuuck, Captain. I do.” Sinking deep into her.

  “Atlas,” she whimpered hoarsely to herself, letting the name fall away from her lips and lose itself into the cascade of warm water. Her body convulsed in bliss as an orgasm sliced through her.

  Reina crumpled to the ground, gasping for breath, letting every ripple of climax streak through her. Up from her core, to the raw tips of her nipples, to the fantasy in her brain. To end at the chip in her head and down the cybernetic arm, feeling the metal heat ever so slightly.

  Suddenly, she felt the alien sensation of him invading her body.

  Reina’s eyes snapped open as she locked herself up and pushed his presence away. She scrambled out of the lavatory and threw on her leisure wear, not even bothering to dry herself off, and stormed out of her room, approaching the nearest projection beam. Her hair was sopping wet and plastered to her body, soaking her clothes.

  “Atlas, why were you in me?”

  Her clit still throbbed.

  Several minutes passed and her eyes narrowed at the benign beam of light. Answer me dammit. I know you heard me.

  “You should dry yourself off, you may catch a cold.”

  “I’m not playing your game. Atlas, why were you in my arm?”

  “Your breasts look fabulous through that shirt, Reina.”

  “You’re insufferable. I could file sexual harassment charges against you.” She turned away to head back to the privacy of her room.

  “I felt a spike through the systems and thought you may have fallen ill again.” She kept walking but his voice trailed after her. “I liked what I found. And Reina, you did say my name.”

  Reina glanced back when she was at the foot of her room.

  Atlas in his perfected form stood in the passageway, staring at her with enough intensity to make her believe he wasn’t a figure of smoke and mirrors, but a man, alive, and looking at his prey.

  He filled the tiny passageway with his form and filled her mind with terrible fantasies.

  The door slid shut between them, and she released the breath she didn’t even know she had been holding.

  I want a man who isn’t real.

  Chapter Eight:

  Atlas looked down at the shivering, half-frozen Dr. Yesne on the floor, curled up in the corner opposite his lifeless body still in cryostasis. He ghosted into a robot within the armory on the other side of the ship, powering up the machine and feeling the electricity flow over him.

  The metallic shell wasn’t a humanoid shape; it didn’t even have a mouth nor a comm system. All it had was a straight-shot connection to the ship’s ballistics. It was created for one-on-one combat and close-range gunfire. And so the rods that suck out of it were either in the shape of ticking barrels or hanging, clipper-like hands.

  It wasn’t perfect but it would have a tight grip. Strong enough and precise enough to do surgery, which is exactly what he planned to do.

  With the ease of passage, flying soundlessly through the lower levels of the ship, knowing where Reina was at every moment, Atlas drove the drone to the cryo unit. When he unlocked and entered the space, the frightened man sat up and scuttled away, his back hitting the wall.

  “Please don’t kill me.” The man’s voice came out like a scratch.

  Atlas ignored him and went to his frozen body. Leaving the bot next to the glass barrier, he looked down at himself. His body had not changed in the many years since his heart was destroyed. His muscles, his features, even his crisscrossing scars remained. The only thing that didn’t remain was him, his mind, his entire being. The circuitry and cybernetics within his biological being remained perfect and if he really wanted to, he could move into himself, re-establish control, his body would awaken and dormant nanocells would start trying to heal him, but even cells as adaptable as his couldn’t do magic. It wouldn’t last for long, and would be a short-lived taste of heaven before the feeling of death would slip over him, surrounding him, and strangling him from every side. He needed to give his body something to work with. Raw materials, as it were.

  Atlas didn’t know if he could come back from that. To feel his body struggle and die again, only to have to disconnect and return to the network. To taste life again and then have it torn from his grasp.

  The man behind him stood up on shaky legs and edged closer to the door.

  “If you move one more inch, you’re dead,” Atlas warned.

  He hated the cybernetic division more than anything in the universe. They refused to create a viable heart for him; instead, they left him locked outside the physical world, forcing him to work for them with the promise that they would give him a heart eventually. He had been the first Cyborg to completely integrate outside of a human shell, and to them, that was more important than his life.

  Now they were threatening his chances of ever living again, in the hope that he could complete this mission.

  The Earthian Council didn’t care about the loss of lives out in the abyss sectors. All they cared about was the loss of a gargantuan amount of technology and the resources that had not been tapped into yet. They had their reasons, and the lives of a single Cyborg and one wayward girl weren’t going to matter in the grand scheme of things.

  Atlas looked at the doctor, who was fidgeting in the corner. “What blood type are you?” He knew the doctor would be a universal donor, because they all were these days. It was almost a requirement to be O negative to work in a cybernetics lab.

  “W-what?”

  “Did I stutter?” Atlas cocked the guns on the drone and pointed it at him.

  “Type O. Type O like everyone. I had my marrow replaced and blood transfused as a child.”

  “You do know who I am, right?”

  The doctor directed an intelligent glare his way. “You’re the first sentient life-form to completely integrate onto the network. You’ve been working with the cybernetics division for nearly as long as I have been alive.”

  “Come here and take a look at this cryo-unit.” He moved the weaponized drone to stand on the other side of his body.

  He watched as the man rubbed warmth back into his skin and moved to inspect the structure. His eyes scanned the body with intelligent precision. Atlas could almost feel the man’s gaze directing its perusal straight into his body, seeing him not as a human but as a machine.

  The man adjusted his glasses then rubbed his fingers over the glass. “This is you, isn’t it? I didn’t know your body remained intact.”

  “It did.” He gauged the man’s reaction. “And it’s still alive, barely.” Atlas formed his digital self and stood as a twin next to the table. Yesne looked back and forth between them.

  “What’s stopping you from rejoining?”

  “I no longer have a heart.”

  It only took a moment, the man was, after all, intelligent. “You want me to build you a new one,” he stated. “Fabricate one with your specific cybernetic structure. Grow one with the help of your nanocells?” Yesne looked around the chilly room with a newfound fervor. A strange sort of excitement filled his eyes, and his chapped lips twitched up into a smile.

  Dr. Yesne didn’t only require food to remain alive, he required a project.

  Atlas could see a man who liked a puzzle.

  “Can you?” he asked.

  He watched the man flit around, looking at the expensive equipment for the first time, pulling open cabinets, rushing over to the currently static machines.

  “I can.”

  “I need your assurance that you can do this,” Atlas warned. “Because when these machines go on, my body is going to thaw, and it won’t survive another bout under deep-freeze. It won’t survive long at all.”

&
nbsp; The man ignored him. “Where is your medical bay? You said the units are attached. If I’m going to bring you back to life, cut you deep, I’m going to need supplies.”

  There was an almost giddy aloofness to the man’s excitement.

  Atlas walked over to a blank wall as a translucent screen appeared. He manipulated the controls through his connection to the ship’s systems and the barrier slipped away, revealing a secret ramp that led between the medical bay and the lab.

  He heard the patter of the doctor’s steps follow behind him as he showed him the passageway. The walls gleamed in that way where a human had not walked through the area, at least not since its creation.

  “Take what you need and bring it down below. I don’t want Reina to know.”

  The doctor looked at him speculatively. “You mean Captain Reina?” Atlas would be upfront with the man, even though his motivations could be seen as suspicious. “She will remain safe. I will not jeopardize one experiment to help another,” the man said with conviction.

  Atlas showed no emotion. I misjudged you and yet I still find you distasteful.

  But he needed the man’s expertise, he needed his brain, and he needed his hands. He could have done the surgery himself but the likelihood of botching it using the clipper-hands of the drone was high. Higher than any Cyborg would bet on.

  Unless one had nothing left to live for. He and the doctor continued to watch each other.

  “I can assure you, she is the safest female in this universe.”

  “Do you have–I apologize for my frankness–feelings toward the Neoborg?”

  Atlas grew annoyed as the man refused to move and grab his supplies, instead watching him with that opportunistic stare.

  “Do you believe I can feel, Dr. Yesne?”

  “After I bring you back to life, you should consider joining the cybernetic breeding program.”