Heart of the Machine

She’s a navigator. He’s the captain...and a cyborg. Does she dare try to capture the heart of the machine?

Billie Latimer is the half-trained navigator on a ship full of refugees, crewed by cyborgs who are just starting to remember who they once were. It’s heartbreaking, but she’s glad to help the men who had everything stolen from them by the military machine. Especially one very special man, who has captured her interest - the captain of the ship. Working with him day after day only brings them closer. She suspects he’s interested in her, as well, but something is keeping him from taking that final step closer.

Captain Medeus knew almost from the start that Billie is the sister of a man he had once called friend. A man who had died aboard Medeus’s last ship. He blames himself and carries a lot of guilt, now that he remembers who he was. He’s not sure it’s fair to continue his pursuit of Billie, knowing she would blame him for the death of her beloved brother, if she knew.

With hostile aliens and the military ready to blow them to smithereens, not to mention pirates, there’s a lot to contend with. Can they keep everyone safe and learn to live again in the chaotic world in which they find themselves? Neither is sure if they can forgive the past and start anew, or if misplaced guilt will keep them apart...forever.

The women had voted for a small group of representatives to be their official liaisons with the cyborgs. Billie was one of them, since, as co-navigator, she worked so closely with the command group on the bridge. And they’d all decided where to go—which was where Billie’s nav skills came in handy.

She had left the most recent meeting only to go to the bridge and plot a course for their agreed-upon destination. The women had decided to let Billie be their spokeswoman to the captain of the ship—an intimidating cyborg called Medeus. Since she was on the bridge almost all the time, that made sense, but it also made her uneasy.

Billie found herself unaccountably attracted to Medeus, despite his scary appearance. Whoever had altered him after his injuries had left him looking more machine than most of the other cyborgs. His face, in particular, had been left with jagged scars where the pseudoskin that covered the repairs joined the original skin.

He’d taken severe damage to the left side of his face. That much was clear. He had an artificial eye on that side, and a diagonal swath of pseudoskin that had not been shaded to match the rest of him. It was an obvious repair that few of the other men showed, even though they’d all had critical damage to be turned into cyborgs.

Medeus had likely been strikingly handsome when he’d been whole. Strong jaw, chiseled lips, which were original, since the scar slashed across the upper left side of his face, from the hairline, between his eyes and downward angling toward his ear. His nose and jaw remained unchanged, and she could easily see he’d been a devastatingly attractive man.

Wavy black hair and bright blue eyes—one of which was now an implanted mechanical eye that could probably spot a fleck of dust from a mile away. But his other eye gave her an idea of what he must have looked like before. Gorgeous.

Billie had found herself thinking inappropriate thoughts about him at the oddest of times. Sometimes, she’d just watch him out of the corner of her eye as he went about his duties on the bridge. She lived in fear of being caught staring at him by one of the observant cyborgs. Her crush on Captain Medeus was nobody’s business but her own.

Still, being assigned to talk to him on a regular basis was no hardship. So, why was she tingling with anticipation at the idea? He was a cyborg. Newly awakened, unlike some of the others. He’d been struggling only a short time to access his lost humanity. She’d seen him doubt, though not when it came to command of the old freighter.

Billie tended to see Medeus as more human than machine, but she knew that was far from the truth. The captain still had a long way to go in recapturing who he had been, and any woman who pinned her hopes on him was probably setting herself up for a great big fall. Billie knew it in her head, but her heart had other ideas.
Knowing they were in for a wild ride no matter what they found at the human colony they were targeting as their first stop, Billie laid in the course after clearing it with the cyborg next to her. He had been checking her work against his internal computer from the moment she’d been given the seat at the nav station. He wasn’t a qualified navigator, but the captain had told her the man in the co-nav position was good with numbers and spatial geometry. He was also able to check her work well enough to keep the cyborg contingent happy that she wasn’t plotting a course that would pop them out in the middle of a supernova.

She almost resented it, but she was only a fledgling navigator, with a little more than half her formal education completed. If she’d been on her first real assignment, a senior navigator would be checking her work, she reminded herself. She tried hard not to let her feelings show, but she was fast coming to dislike the young cyborg they’d partnered her with. He was just a little too smugly machine-like for her taste.

“Course laid in,” she reported as she completed the input.

“Helmsman, implement new course,” Medeus instructed the cyborg at the helm.

As she watched her course start to take hold of the old ship, she crossed her fingers for luck, but it was the captain who surprised her with his quiet words.

“For better or worse, there’s no turning back now.”