light dull silver gray to an almost pewter color. Their bodies were thick, buff, massive, and they were all tall—the shortest one was about six-foot-two while the tallest was inches more in height—but that was where the similarities stopped. One of the men had shockingly white hair while the other two had black hair like the one who gently gripped her hand.

“Leave her with us,” the general said gruffly. “You’re machines so you don’t need to rape a woman.

Take whatever the hell you want and let us go.”

The redheaded pilot was unusually pale. “They won’t let any of us go,” he whispered. “They only attack when they’re looking for spare human materials.”

The general paled noticeably and pure terror showed on his face. The other pilot moaned softly, shaking with fear. Mira looked up at the large cyborg still holding her hand to watch as he tilted his head slightly, studying the three bound men carefully. He turned toward the white-haired cyborg .

“Take DNA samples of the males and strip the shuttle of anything we can safely salvage from them.”

The white-haired cyborg jerked his head in affirmation that he’d heard before reaching into one of the large pockets of his black pants to withdraw a small case. Mira watched silently as the man withdrew a small, white device from inside the case and gripped one of the pilots. He extracted blood and tissue from the man’s arm. The pilot groaned in pain but it was over quickly. The cyborg extracted samples from the other two men and then his gaze lifted to Mira.

“Her?”

“No.” The cyborg standing next to her shook his head.

The other frowned. “But—”

“Enough, Ice. Don’t question me in front of the humans.” He smiled coldly.

Ice grinned. “So should we take human materials, Flint?”

Flint looked amused. “Let me think about it while you strip the ship.”

Mira eyed the cyborg standing next to her, still gripping her hand. His name was Flint. The government had announced that they’d destroyed every last cyborg model made but they had obviously lied since she was staring at four of them. Supposedly, the last of the cyborgs had been stamped out of existence when she was a child, their destruction having been ordered by the government nearly twenty years before she was born.

Out of curiosity, she’d read as much as she could about them, and from what she remembered, they had been assigned numbers instead of names. Part of her was excited at seeing that they had survived while part of her was ashamed because what had been done to them.

As the three cyborgs tore the shuttle apart removing what they wanted to take she let her mind drift to her history lessons. At first scientists and doctors had used cybernetics to replace missing limbs, failed organs, and they’d managed to map the human brain to help the mentally ill. They had also made advancements to help repair brain-damaged people to be fully functional again. Eventually they’d mated humans with technology enough to think they could increase lifespan to a projected two hundred years.

With space travel advancing, the scientists had decided disposable soldiers were a brilliant idea.

Mira had cringed in horror at learning that part of history. The military and the scientific community had gotten together for Project Cyborg . They had grown cyborgs in laboratories, made them tougher, stronger, bigger than humans and with longer life spans. They wanted to send them out into deep space for exploration.

What they hadn’t counted on were their perfect soldiers becoming self-aware when their human side overrode the programmed chips in their brains. Cyborgs had demanded basic civil rights and when they were denied those rights, the rebellion had started. Cyborgs hadn’t been violent but instead they’d gone on strike, refusing to work for a government that wouldn’t admit they were sentient beings. It had really pissed off the government.

Fearing that the animosity would escalate and the cyborgs would call an all-out war against their creators, humans became afraid. The government had ordered all cyborgs destroyed. Sympathetic humans had tried to hide the cyborgs to keep them safe but it was announced one day when she was about twelve years old that every unaccounted model had been found and destroyed. Mira had cried when she heard that the last of the cyborgs were forever gone. She thought it was a screwed-up thing to deny them rights since they were human—at least mostly human—and she thought genocide of a created race was a horror.

The Earth Government had definitely lied