Lifting her hand, she blocked the bright lights, and her vision sharpened. Huh. Focus was automatic. That was neat. Then the hand in front of her caught her attention. Slender and finely boned, covered in delicate-looking skin.
Skin. Her eyes widened. She had skin. Actual, proper skin.
A gasp escaped her and she looked down. More skin, covering a female form.
“I have skin,” she murmured and leapt to her feet.
Her legs supported her for all of a second. Then they buckled, and she faceplanted again.
“Draanth,” she groaned, getting a rapid education in the fact that hitting the deck in a biological body hurt.
She got her hands under her and pushed up, biting her lower lip as she slid her knees under her. Biologicals made this look so easy. How on earth did they manage to coordinate the balance and the limbs at the same time? Concentrating hard, she lifted, sliding first one foot, then the other under her. Legs shaking, she slowly stood.
“Whoa…”
She was standing. Her left knee shook. No auto-correct feature. Focusing, she managed to stabilize it. Okay, she could work with that. Her face pulled between the brows and she blinked, hands shooting up to touch… her face.
Instead of the blank, smooth plate she was used to, it was soft, the skin yielding slightly beneath her fingers. Her fingertips wandered, exploring. Eyes, nose, lips.
“I have a face. Oh lady, I have a face.”
Dropping her hands, she looked around and spotted a reflective surface. One of the windows into the cabal’s archives. With determination, she headed for it.
She had to know what she looked like. In all the years since she’d become aware, she’d often dreamed of being a real person. What she would look like if she’d been born rather than made. In her mind’s eye she would be tall, with a regal bearing and inky dark hair that flowed like a cape over her shoulders.
She stumble-walked-staggered toward the window, concentrating hard to get the feet, knees, and balance all co-ordinated. Goddess, how many muscles did a body need working all at the same time to move it?
Making it to the window, she gripped the edge and squeezed her eyes tightly shut. She couldn’t look…
She’d never had a face before. Not of her own anyway. When she’d first become self-aware, she’d been integrated into a ship, its hull her body. Her “face” had been a mobile input unit with free range of the interior that Rynn, her owner, had installed for her. She’d felt so free and better than other AIs because of it. She wasn’t just a disembodied voice for Rynn. She had a face, something he could interact with.
He’d been more than her owner though. He’d been the closest thing she had to family. When the D’Corr had tried to kill him, she’d flung him halfway across space to save his life, sacrificing herself to make sure he lived. She’d started to shut down, ready to die in the blast that would destroy the ship.
Then she’d registered a lifeform still on board.
Jay.
She bit her lip at the thought of the handsome human, and the sensation blindsided her for a few seconds. He’d been in a holding cell, battered and bruised. She’d had to save him, downloading herself into a worker bot to do so, even though it was against every single Latharian law governing AIs. She didn’t care. He had been alive, barely. Which meant she’d had to save him…
Slowly, she cracked open an eye. Then another, a gasp of surprise escaping her as she looked at her reflection in the window. All she could see was a pair of large, dark eyes.
Okay, so she was short then. Not the regal bearing she’d envisioned. Eyes wide with wonder, she carefully lifted on her tiptoes, fingertips clinging to the bottom of the window frame so she could see the rest of her new face.
The dark eyes were set above a small nose and a pair of full lips. She blinked. The reflection blinked. She turned her head to the side. So did the woman in the window.
It was her. She had a body. She was a real person.
Then she burst into tears.
3
The problem with being on an abandoned, secret alien base was the lack of routine. Jay rubbed at the back of his neck as he wandered into the galley after his nap.
As predicted, the procedure to implant the translation matrix had given him a headache. So he’d taken a painkilling shot and had a lie down in a dark room. Somewhere between lying down and studying the inside of his eyelids, he’d dropped off. But routine was a powerful thing, and as a soldier, he was used to powernaps so he was back on his feet after a couple of REM cycles and looking for something to do.
Given that he had none of the skills required to help get the base operational and was more of a danger to himself and everyone else when put in charge of power tools, he’d been banned from helping. He’d resorted to creating a schedule of his own to pass the time.
In the mornings he trained with Seren and sometimes Nyek. The alien paladin was the better instructor, but hardline and so focused he was scary, even for an ubermarine like Jay. He’d mastered many martial arts in his life, but sometimes he felt like a complete left-footed noob when he didn’t get a move as quickly as Nyek expected and the guy stared at him. Like proper stared. With an expression that could cut plate steel. On the whole he preferred Seren. The alien warrior was far quicker to smile and more “one of the lads.”
After training, Jay usually read anything he could understand from the base’s database. Most of it he could not since it was in Latharian, which he couldn’t make head nor tail of yet. Hence the new translation matrix.
He rubbed at his short-cropped hair as he padded into the galley, his stomach complaining that he’d missed lunch. It was about time to start making the evening meal. Given he had no other practical skills, he’d somehow found himself as their team’s chef.
“So what can we put on the menu today?” he mused, opening the cupboard.
Then froze.
Seren had indeed labeled the raw ingredients. The bag nearest to him had “bugs” written in a bold hand on the front. Several bags next to it were also “bugs.” The shelf down contained an assortment of “big bugs,” “little bugs” and “crunchy bugs” while the bottom one held “more bugs.”
He barked with laughter. “That fucking alien wanker!”
Shaking his head, he grabbed bags he recognized for his favorite pasta dish. At least, it was the nearest he’d managed to get to pasta out here. As far as he was concerned, the Lathar were utterly uncivilized for not developing any form of cheese. He reached in for a bag of “little bugs.” The Latharian script itself was still incomprehensible. Ripping open the top, he added the contents to a pan with some water. It wasn’t quite cheese sauce, but it would do.
Humming to himself, he cooked with ingredients that were almost like those from home if he squinted and looked sideways at them. Pasta in cheese sauce. He also made up a batch of field cake for the ladies. He couldn’t stand the stuff, but even he knew the power of chocolate on the female psyche.
“What is that delicious smell?”
He slid a glance sideways.
A naked woman stood next to him. Like totally, butt naked, her only covering the dark mass of her hair, and that just covered her shoulders. His eyes widened, his hand frozen over the pan of bug sauce. She was fucking gorgeous. Petite with wide, dark eyes sent a bolt of heat right through his body to his cock. And she was naked. He blinked, totally not forgetting about the nakedness.