Cyborg Nation by Kaitlyn O'Connor (e novels to read TXT) 📕

but she decided she could afford to spend a few moments studying over the control panels.

She could see at a quick glance that the set up was typical of others she’d seen, but then she had never done much more than glance at the control center of a vessel, or watch, without a lot of comprehension, as the pilots and co-pilots and navigators manipulated their various instrument panels and monitored the vid displays. Everything was clearly marked with legends, though, and she managed to identify what most of the various controls were for. To a great extent, she knew the ship pretty much flew itself, or more accurately the computer flew the ship, just as it maintained everything on the ship.

The pilot came in when maneuvering was needed, which was mostly at launch and landing but could also include the need to avoid an obstacle in space that might not have been there the last time one passed through. Nothing in space was ‘fixed’. It wasn’t like surface travel on some world where one could memorize all the landmarks and expect them to be in the same place when one made the return trip.

Piloting a space craft required not only lightening reflexes but extremely accurate reflexes because of the speed at which the ship was traveling and the often many times greater speed of the objects in space traveling toward it or on a course that bisected the ship’s course.

Therein was the rub. She might be able to convince the computer to turn around and head back if she could figure out the right coordinates. She might not even have to try to figure out how to trick the computer into listening to her, because it might not be secured against her voice, but she thought that most likely it was.

She couldn’t pilot the ship, however. Not only had she never done that, she was honest enough to accept that her reflexes were not only a long way from lightening fast, they were also a long way from pinpoint accuracy. As often as not, when she reacted, her coordination was clumsy at best and disastrous at worse.

And piloting wasn’t the only stumbling block. Navigation was critical. The ship’s course had to be carefully monitored and precisely corrected at regular intervals. They weren’t just traveling through ‘empty’ space. They were traveling through gravitational fields, mostly so weak that they couldn’t even feel them, and yet they were still enough to effect the ship, to alter its course in one direction or another as it was pulled at from first one direction and then another. Drifting so much as a hair’s breadth at point A could mean not just missing the planet one was aiming at. It could mean missing the entire solar system, or maybe even the galaxy.

The best she could hope for would be to retrace their course and hope that she could get close enough to communicate with someone who could come and get her, or slow the ship down enough they could catch her in a tractor beam and pull her in.

After glancing around quickly to make certain no one had spotted her yet, Bronte moved to the seat Gideon generally occupied, which allowed him to monitor both the ship’s controls and the navigational controls. She stared at the star chart displayed on the vid, trying to find a point of orientation. She wasn’t a lot more accustomed to star charts than she was the ship’s controls, but every kid in school had to learn to identify the major population centers—occupied solar systems—in their own galaxy and, of course, the galaxy itself plus the known galaxies around it.

Nothing looked even vaguely familiar to her, though, she realized in dismay. Frowning, she fell to studying the clusters on the display, wondering if it was just the direction that made the patterns look different—because galaxies had an identifiable pattern that could be memorized and she should’ve been able to recognize at least one.

A shadow fell across the screen. She didn’t even realize it for a split second, except she noticed there was no longer an irritating, reflective glare from the lighting behind her.

Gideon, she saw when her brain finally connected ‘no glare’ with ‘shadow’, was standing over her, his face a mirror of fury. Bronte gaped at him in absolute horror for several moments.

He didn’t ask her what she was doing. He didn’t need to. There could be no doubt whatsoever what she was doing.

Bronte didn’t even try to think up a lie. It was pointless to try even if she could’ve managed any sort of mental acrobatics when she had no excuse at all for being where she was.

She bolted upward out of the seat as if she’d been ejected from it and made a valiant attempt to dive past him. He caught her as she rushed past, hooking an arm around her waist and allowing her momentum to carry her full circle until he had her trapped between himself and the wall. Trapped, Bronte gaped up at him, belatedly recalling that he’d told her that, while she didn’t have to worry that any of them would hurt her for any reason, that didn’t mean she didn’t have to concern herself that there would be no retaliation for anything she did. Unfortunately, instead of inspiring fear and by virtue of that, a sense of self-preservation, that memory triggered the memory of what he’d done to ‘teach her a lesson’ for biting him. Her reaction was instantaneous. Heat flooded her and her belly went weightless.

It was at that precise moment that she noticed several things about him that she’d failed to notice in the first few moments of sheer terror.

Rage didn’t exactly, or at least not totally, describe his expression. It was rather equal parts anger and raging desire.

He was shaking, his breath heaving raggedly in and out of his chest, obviously in the grips of conflicting emotions a lot more powerful and chaotic than just anger.

A split second before