Chapter One

“Mayday! Mayday! This is Captain Amanda Lee of the International Space Liner Anna Marie. The shuttle Xray Kill one niner seven is under attack. Mayday! Mayday! I’m going down at coordinates ….”

There still wasn’t a response, but Amanda realized she was out of time. If she didn’t bail now, she was going to be splattered all over Beauterre. Throwing her safety harness off, she leapt out of her seat and charged toward the back, hesitating only long enough to snatch her duffle of survival rations and gear, a weapon, and a kite. She was way too low for a parachute, now, like the others had used. There would be no time to deploy it.

She just hoped the glider could get her to the ground in one piece.

She didn’t have any choice at this point, regardless, except to jump and maybe live, or stay and die.

She didn’t want to make impact with the ground with the ship.

Securing her gear to herself the best she could when she got to the rear hatch, she jerked the kite out, got a firm grip on the guidance bar, ran down the ramp, and jumped.

She was lower than she’d expected—and she’d expected low.

She was damned near in the tree canopy already, skimming the highest branches within moments.

She’d hoped to be able to stay airborne long enough to meet up with some of the crew before she touched down.

That wasn’t happening, clearly.

But she couldn’t think about that now.

She focused on trying to find a fairly open area to land, a hole to punch through the canopy—anything that might give her a better chance of landing without serious injury.

She found a hole.

The limbs of the trees surrounding it pretty much shredded the kite going through and she began to plummet toward the ground a lot faster than she’d anticipated.

She felt a bone snap as she landed. The pain that shot through her tore a scream from her throat that seemed to echo forever and then she hit the ground and darkness swallowed her.

She had no idea how long she was out, but when she managed to open her eyes, she found herself staring up at the canopy of trees overhead and … three giants, who were staring down at her.

Why was she staring at the sky, she wondered, when she thought she’d landed face first?

The giants crouched around her.

One of them, a man with inky black hair that was longer than hers, felt her all over and found a place that nearly threw her back into the black pit again.

“This will hurt,” he said, just before he wrenched her broken leg. Thankfully, she only had to endure for a moment before she passed from conscious once more.

When she came around the next time, she was moving. It disoriented her. She certainly wasn’t moving under her own steam—or lying on any kind of gurney. She was laying on her side against something rock hard—that was moving in and out like a bellows and exuded heat. She struggled to make sense of it for a few moments and then gave up and sank again into oblivion.

Jostling aroused her the next time she swam toward the surface and that was also confusing because she could feel hands pulling at her, could feel herself moving upward. She groaned as the bumping caused her pain to rise to a higher level, trying to figure out what was going on.

“Search and rescue?” she whispered.

“No.”

Her heart jerked in her chest, but she felt too damned bad to feel the fear she was certain she should and she was in no condition to protect or defend herself even she had. She licked her dry lips. “Don’t kill me. I’ve got nothing. Couldn’t identify you.”

She could sense a jolt move through the ‘object’ holding her then and realized for the first time that someone was holding her.

“You are safe. We will not hurt you.”

Safe?

Could she trust that?

Did she have a choice?

It was the smell of cooking food that woke her later. She had no idea how much later, but she roused up from never-land to a world of pain. “I … hurt,” she complained. “Can I … have something for pain?”

She felt a presence and managed to lever her eyelids up a hair and squint at the figure.

It was a giant of a man, she discovered, feeling a shockwave go through her before she remembered him from before. “We have nothing.”

She digested that with abject dismay before she recalled her survival gear in her duffle. “My bag?”

He moved away. Returning in a few moments, he dropped the bag beside her. She struggled to sit up and open the bag to search it.

She thought for several moments that she was going to pass out or throw up just from that scant effort.

“What are you looking for?”

“Med kit,” she gasped, falling back and panting for breath.

He took the bag and rifled through it, producing the med kit after a few moments. She reached for it, but he opened it, studied the contents and then glanced over his shoulder and spoke to someone she couldn’t see. “Bring water.”

Someone slipped an arm under her shoulders and lifted her up high enough to drink a sip, then she was handed pills that she popped into her mouth and chased with another sip of water.

She didn’t consider, until whoever had lifted her up carefully settled her again, that she hadn’t even looked at the pills. She’d just assumed they knew which were the pain pills.

Well, she thought, if it was something to kill her she just hoped it was quick, because she hurt too fucking badly to care if it killed her.

Thankfully, the pain began to ease off enough to take the nausea with it.

Someone settled on the bed or pallet beside her, lifted her until she was almost in a sitting position, and then moved her until she was propped again him. He moved a steaming bowl in front of her then and put a spoon in her hand.

Soup! It smelled heavenly. Dismay flickered through her, though, when she tried to lift the spoon and discovered she was so shaky weak it was all she could do to get it to the bowl. She was going to have it all over her if she filled it and tried to get it to her mouth.

He took it from her hand and dismay so profound washed over her she thought for a minute she was going to cry.

“Here. I will help.”

It was embarrassing to be fed, but she was hungry. When he blew on the food and tested it, she was more embarrassed, but she opened her mouth when he held it to her lips and took it. For a handful of seconds her stomach seemed undecided over whether to keep it or not, but the heat began to spread through her and her belly calmed.

Unfortunately, she had eaten no more than a few bites when the pleasure and comfort of the food began to war with the pain and strain of her body and then the pain produced a wave of nausea. “I can’t eat more.”

He seemed undecided about whether to insist or not, but finally he set the bowl aside. “Water?”

“Yes.”

He helped her drink a little water and then set the glass down and very carefully and gently settled her on the bed again.

She wondered at it.

He was so massive it seemed incongruous that he could also be so gentle.

And she no longer thought that was nothing but imagination. True, her senses were dulled, and disoriented beyond that, but she’d seen the size of his hands. Comparatively, the bowl and spoon looked like something from a child’s tea set. For that matter, the spoon was fisted in a hand that felt like it was as big as her face every time he lifted the spoon for her.

The floor shook when he got up and walked across it to a table on the other side of the room where two other giants sat.

Settling, he finished off the food she’d left and then refilled it from a pot on the table.

That was a little unsettling.

Ok, more than a little. She didn’t consider herself germ-a-phobic, but this was an alien world. She’d been inoculated against everything they were aware of, but …

The men weren’t natives.

She hadn’t seen any, but these men, as big as they were, were human.

Brothers?

She couldn’t see anything but the profile of one, three quarter face of another, but she could see the full face of the last and there wasn’t even a hint of alien about it.

Unless one counted the fact that he was heart stoppingly gorgeous.

Beyond that, the natives were supposed to be primitive and although the place where they’d brought her didn’t exactly look modern, it damned sure didn’t look primitive and they looked way too healthy to be primitives.

They certainly weren’t search and rescue—according to them, she recalled—plus the fact that they seemed to be in a cabin in the back of beyond.

Because she’d been miles and miles from the nearest settlement when she had to ditch the shuttle. It seemed very unlikely she could have been unconscious long enough for them to carry her very far.

That also meant, to her thinking, that they couldn’t be colonists.

Well, not legitimate, at any rate.

So had she landed in the lap of a group of pirates/smugglers?

She had a hard time accepting that when they could’ve just turned their back on her and left her and no one would ever have known they were there.

It seemed highly unlikely, though, that this little setup they had was completely aboveboard when she knew for a fact that it had to be miles and miles from any settlement.

The real question, she supposed, was how much danger she was in? But she felt too bad to worry about it very long before she fell out again.

* * * *

Trinity glanced at Caleb and Kameron. “They will come looking for her.”

“Of a certainty,” Kameron agreed. “I am not certain what we might do about it, however. She cannot be moved until she has had time to recover. And we could not simply abandon her in the forest to be found. She would not be able to protect herself at all.”

“She would be eaten,” Caleb said grimly. “We could not have left her to die.”

“No. So we will now have to decide what is best for us to do. We must find a way to protect her and ourselves.”

“I cannot fathom how that might be accomplished,” Trinity said.

Kameron frowned. “If there was technology that might be accessed it would be very helpful,” he said thoughtfully.

“You would have to go all the way to Capitol City to do that—and breech the company’s system—which would then render it pointless.”

Reluctantly, Kameron agreed. “Unfortunately. We will have to use the old fashioned security measures.”

Trinity and Caleb exchanged a long look.

“I will take first watch,” Trinity said.

Caleb looked at Kameron. “Would you prefer second watch or third?”

“I will take third. I would prefer neither.”

“It if was an option.”

“Affirmative—if—which it is not. And very likely we will be watching days, perhaps many, before they arrive to investigate and search for survivors.”

No one said anything for many moments.

“I am not sorry that we found her,” Kameron said pensively. “I have not seen a woman of any kind in … a very long time.” He frowned. “Well except the old woman we trade with from time to time.”

“It is a shame we cannot keep her,” Caleb said. “It would be ….” Words failed him. “I would like to have a woman, I think.”

“I would have liked to have a woman,” Trinity said. “And that one is very pretty … despite being very banged up.”

“Mayhap, since we cannot take her back until she is recovered, we could try to woo her?”

A jolt went through Kameron at the suggestion Caleb made—which seemed to be a serious one even though he was inclined to think it nonsensical. “Risky,” he responded. “It would be safer to send her back or take her back as quickly as possible—else there is a very good chance that she will know what we are.”

Caleb nodded—as if in agreement. “I am willing to take the chance.”

Kameron and Trinity exchanged a look and then shrugged.

“There is one small problem,” Kameron pointed out.

“Beyond the many that comes instantly to my mind,” Trinity said, “What?”

“We are soldiers. I do not have programming for wooing a woman and I am completely convinced that neither of you do either.”

“Other than that, though?” Caleb asked.

Kameron studied him with a touch of exasperation. “Other than the fact that we have no notion of how to woo a woman, especially a human woman; the possibility that we will be discovered and have to find shelter elsewhere or be destroyed; the likelihood that she would run screaming the moment she discovered that we were cyborg? Why I see no problem at all.”

“That is what I was thinking,” Caleb said. “I heard that there were some who found their own woman and now they have a family unit. I have heard that some have even produced … young.”

Kameron felt the strangest sensations wash through him. Of the many strange sensations he had experienced since enlightenment, this was the strangest yet. It was … almost a sensation of being inflated, becoming light and floating. Unnerved, and at the same time excited, hot, dizzy. His mouth went dry. “That is nonsense. Most were destroyed in the war the humans waged against the cyborgs after they attained awareness. They are not living at all, let alone have women, and they could not make families.”

Trinity wrestled with his urge to speak. “I have heard similar things.”

“Because there are rumors, that does not make it so,” Kameron said, angry for no reason that he could grasp—until it dawned on him that it was want, and hope, and need that had made him feel the strange sensations. And that accepting it as nothing more than fairy tales took all that away again. “Even if all of that was true, this woman works for the company. It may not be the same company that wiped out the cyborgs, but it is a company and they would not tolerate our existence either. She would not accept us if we knew how to woo her.”

They all turned to look at her, studying her with varying degrees of disappointment and anger.

“I am thinking that we are going to be forced to flee for our lives again regardless of what we do or do not do,” Trinity said finally. “Why not at least attempt to turn the situation to our advantage?”

* * * *

Amanda had the most bizarre dream she’d ever had after she took her pain meds and fell into a stupor. She supposed, later when she was able to at least try to sort it, that it must have been brought on by her uneasiness about her ‘rescuers’, the pain, perhaps a touch of infection from the break, and the medication itself. Like many dreams, though, it was a strange mix of ‘truth’ and fiction.

The three men were actually robots and they wanted to marry her—all of them—and make robot babies. That wouldn’t have particularly troubled her except that strange ‘scene’ was followed by a series of highly erotic, poorly detailed, sexual fantasies that featured all of them and stirred her up so much it woke her.

The one who’d held her and fed her was watching her from across what seemed to be a one room cabin. He got up and approached her when he saw her eyes open and crouched beside her. “You are ok?”

Her mouth felt like she’d been eating cotton and her heart was still beating frantically from the dream she’d had. “Thirsty,” she finally managed to croak.

Evidently he had anticipated she would be thirsty. He had a pitcher of water close by. He poured some into a mug and then helped her sit up to drink.

She felt a faint shaking in his arm once he’d helped her up enough to drink. By the time she’d taken a couple of sips it was more pronounced and hard to ignore. “I’m heavy—sorry.”

He shifted from the crouch to his knees. “You are as heavy as … moonlight,” he murmured.

Surprised by the almost poetic turn, she flicked a quick look up at him.

The lighting was dim, no doubt because it was night time and there was only a single source of artificial light that made him a shadowy figure to say the least, but she found that she could see him fairly well despite that.

He had been far more shadowy in her dream.

He was pretty breathtakingly handsome, she realized abruptly, his features attractive in singular and, together, creating something well beyond merely attractive. Her eyes, she realized, hadn’t done him justice before and she’d thought he was handsome then.

There was certainly nothing ‘robot like’ about him.

“I’m Amanda,” she said, remembering her manners. “Thank you for … helping me.”

His gaze scanned her face in a way that warmed her. “We could not ignore your need,” he murmured. “I am Kameron.”