by Elsa Jade
To his strangely altered eyes, the familiar ranch seemed brighter, the greens of the pine decorations more lush, the red of the tinsel ribbon more vivid, even the stacked hay seemed more golden. His perception of the hues had obviously been unduly influenced by the “bad Christmas movies” that he’d so rapidly scanned. He would have to review them at a more careful speed at his first opportunity.
But first, the cats. To his suddenly intensified sensitivities, they would be so, so soft, he was sure.
Before he could head for the barn, the rumble of an engine broke the stillness of the winter air. He stiffened, peering down the ranch road. It was not the sound of Lindy’s truck or anything from the Fallen A.
Spinning on his heel, he ran swiftly back to the house. With one leap, he was up the stairs and through the door. “Delta,” he roared. “Intruders.”
Perhaps it was not actually an enemy, but whoever it was, they were definitely intruding since he had no record of any visitor planned. After the scavenger ship that had come two months ago, hoping to abscond with a few unclaimed shrouds, they had all stayed on high alert.
He retrieved a rifle from behind the door. They’d upgraded several Earther weapons with the shroud technology salvaged from the crashed matrix transport. But they hadn’t had much to work with. When Cosmo had suggested killing the scavengers and claiming all of their technology, the Alpha had felt it was more important to anonymously turn them in to planetary security, along with most of their belongings, in order to establish precedent that the CWBOIs—when they eventually revealed themselves—were not dangerously unstable and deadly beings. Or at least not all of them.
He checked the charge on the blaster-rifle and sent a minuscule number of his nanites into the weapon to sync. Despite his minor losses to Wog’s claws and Vic’s probe, he too was fully charged.
He growled low in his chest. The subsonics equalized the spread of his nanites, but the other amplitudes carried well through any sufficiently dense atmosphere—the sound meant to establish his dominance and inform enemies of their imminent demise.
From behind him, the Delta put one hand over the barrel, pushing it down.
For a second, Cosmo resisted. “You are not the Alpha of me,” he said through gritted teeth.
“My gun, my house, my rules,” the Delta informed him. “We don’t shoot until we know who it is.”
“And once we have a positive identification,” Cosmo pressed, “then we shoot.”
Delta rolled his eyes. “Only if it’s someone who needs shooting.”
Cosmo scowled. “You have many rules for this one gun.”
Vic peered around the corner. “What’s all the shouting?” Her gaze dropped to the gun. “Er, shooting?”
“Someone is approaching the ranch,” Cosmo told her. “You know about the scavengers?” When she nodded, he continued, “They must not be allowed to cause such havoc this time.”
“It’s an Earther truck,” Delta pointed out. “Not a space-faring ship.”
Cosmos lifted his chin. “They could be sneakier now.”
Delta shook his head. “Let me talk.”
With a disgruntled look, Cosmo stepped back outside. “Of course. That’s why I have the gun.”
To his surprise, Vic followed him. In her bright red hoodie, she was too obvious a target. At least she’d put on her terrifying head-hat, which would warn the intruders that she was an accomplished butcher herself.
She moved a little closer to him, not quite jostling his elbow. “You don’t really think it’s the scavengers coming back, do you? Lindy told me you beat them pretty badly. I can’t believe they’d come back for more. Especially when you reminded them that even if they managed to steal you, the consortium would hunt them down for taking their property.”
“Unclaimed shrouds would be worth many times our weight in various costly resources. While the imglor scavengers are no doubt still in security custody, others may have intercepted the same signal that revealed us.” His hands tightened around the rifle. “The Delta is wrong to give them any chance to confront us again.”
“Not giving anyone that chance,” Delta said from where he’d taken a wide stance on the front step. “But I’m not wrong about needing to make this a place where bullets and blaster beams aren’t flying around my baby.”
Cosmo huffed under his breath. “If you enhanced her—”
Vic cleared her throat. “Probably that’s a conversation for another…never?”
He glanced at her. Even though she knew he was a programmed killer with an alien weapon in his hand at this very moment, she didn’t hesitate to speak up. Although she’d confessed that fear made her talk.
He didn’t mean to scare her.
Carefully, he angled the blaster-rifle away from everyone—even where the approaching truck would park. Not that he couldn’t bring the muzzle to bear instantly. His proximity link with the nanites he’d sent into the weapon kept him perfectly aware of his armed status. But if the Delta and Vic wanted to give peace on Earth a chance, his reflexes could provide them a few extra milliseconds for the attempt.
He stood, quiet and alert, as the huge, quad-cab pickup angled into the yard, its studded tires crunching over the snow.
Still commanding the front step, the Delta stiffened. “It’s Tanner Cross,” he reported. “Don’t shoot him. Yet.”
“Who is Tanner Cross?” Vic whispered.
“Local Earther male with delusions of authority,” Cosmo said. “He previously attempted to entice and then coerce both the Alpha and Lindy Minervudottir into selling him their ranches. When he was rejected, he returned to the Fallen A with inadequate backup and attempted to restate his case at gunpoint.” Vic gasped and he reassured her, “He was handily defeated and his memory wiped. He’s been out of town since then. Perhaps he needs a reminder that can’t be forgotten.” He growled again, energizing the nanites.
“Cool it,” Delta said. “Cross is the reason Lindy and I got together since I was keeping an eye on her after he attacked us. Because of that, I’ll give him one chance to drive away unscathed.”
“I’m cool,” Cosmo muttered. “Very cool. I’m basically ambient temperature.”
Vic made a garbled sound, almost a laugh.
Emerging from the truck, Cross tipped the wide brim of his hat back and hooked his thumbs behind his belt buckle. The stance was meant to be self-assured, but it would slow him down—fatally. Still, his gaze was sharp as he scanned them on the porch. Cosmo faded back a half step, letting the shadows grant him anonymity and greater menace.
Cross focused on the Delta and stomped toward the front of the truck. His shiny leather boots left pointy toe marks in the snow. “Halley. What are you doing here?”
“Being neighborly,” Delta said. “You?”
With narrowed quicksand-colored eyes, Cross muttered, “Same. Where’s Miz Lindy?”
“Out.” Delta gestured in a way that managed to indicate all the geographic cardinal directions at once. “I’ll tell her you stopped by.” He tilted his head. “Why did you stop by?”
“Didn’t realize you two had gotten so neighborly that you’d be propping up her porch rail.” Cross dragged one boot heel, a frustrated motion that reminded Cosmo of the ranch bulls. The animals were sometimes depicted as slow and stupid, but not by anyone who’d ever had to run from one.
Cosmo half-closed his eyes. Not that he ever ran.
“Ah, yeah,” Delta drawled. “Miz Lindy and I are—I guess you’d say engaged. But you probably haven’t heard since you’ve been out of town. DWI, wasn’t it?” He waggled one finger and chuckled. “Gotta be careful there, Cross. Wouldn’t want to crash that nice truck into something that won’t get out of your way.”
Even from his position concealed on the porch, Cosmo thought he could hear Cross’s teeth grinding.
“Engaged?” Cross put his hands on his hips, spreading his unbuttoned leather vest to expose a perfect column of acceptably fatal target zone. “Well then. If you�
�re going to be the man around here, maybe you’ll have the sense to hear me out.” He glowered. “More than your brother did, anyway. No one will offer you a better deal—”
“Not even you,” Delta interrupted cheerily. “Here’s the thing, Cross. My brother won’t sell the Fallen A. Lindy won’t sell Strix Springs. There’re other places might hear you out, but it won’t be here.”
“This is the place,” Cross snapped. He cast a quick glance over his shoulder before pushing his hat back farther. Tufts of thin brown hair, riled by his shoving, fell across a coin-sized black mark at his temple. “I’m prepared to double—”
“Hold on there, Cross. Before you get too complicated with the math, I should tell you, we recently added one.”
Cross scowled. “One to what?”
“One, two, three.” Delta beamed at him. “Exactly. Lindy and Amber have a baby daughter who will inherit the ranch.”
Cross boggled at him. “Amber?” His eyes slitted. “Her wife? But she passed away years ago. And Miz Lindy is too old for baby.”
Delta flicked one finger dismissively. “Oh, it was a technological marvel, no doubt. You’d be surprised what can be done these days.”
Cosmo nodded to himself. Yes, that was what he was. He’d made Stella, so he was a technological marvel. Perhaps that would be his new designation: Omega, Cosmo, marvel.
He stared at Cross. He would also willingly surprise the loud, annoying Earther if the male took one more step toward the house. Maybe one shot to the strange dark circle on the side of his head. The blaster would make a larger hole on the other side, not black, but blood-red…
The insidious violence that lurked in his deepest core reminded him he could only be one thing: Omega.
But Delta was still talking. “So I’m afraid that one little addition cancels out any number you might be about to say. You’ll have to find someone else who needs your money.”
“It’s not just the money.” Cross’s quicksand eyes darkened with an expression Cosmo couldn’t immediately identify. Until the Earther male glanced at the truck again.
The side windows were darkly tinted, and the thin winter sunlight bounced off the windshield so that even Cosmo’s enhanced optics couldn’t penetrate the glare.
But now he deciphered the expression on Cross’s face: it was fear.
“My investor wants these places,” Cross insisted. “You don’t understand—”
A sharp tap at the glass interrupted him, and maybe an Earther would have missed the way he flinched at the sound. With the faintest sibilant hiss, the passenger window on the truck rolled down. From the defensive angle he’d chosen on the porch, Cosmo couldn’t see inside but one hand emerged and flicked impatiently at Cross.
This time, even an Earther would see Cross’s unease. “This isn’t over,” he said, his hiss quite a bit louder than the deluxe vehicle.
“If I shoot him now it will be over,” Cosmo murmured.
“You’re trying to be a better person, remember?” Vic murmured back.
“I’m not a person.”
“Half, or thereabouts.”
Cross was still a loud, annoying male, and Cosmo’s nanites informed him that he could open up the Earther’s rib cage with one precise shot from the blaster-rifle, but somehow Vic’s reminder took the edge off the murderousness. It wasn’t the reminder itself that calmed him, he decided, but the little note of teasing in her voice, as if she didn’t think he’d actually do it and just wanted to joke with him.
As a real cowboy would say, gosh dang it. Now he couldn’t gut Cross without looking like he didn’t know how to take a joke.
Responding to the summons from the passenger in the truck, Cross hurried back to the driver side. Yanking open the door, he stepped up onto the running board and shot one last glare over the frame before he slid behind the wheel with such a quickness he nearly knocked his hat off.
The slam of the truck door and gunning engine shattered the winter quiet. The heavy wheels spun across the snow before the studs caught, and the truck jerked into a turn back toward the road to town. As quickly as it went, Cosmo had the strange impression that the Earther male was seriously stuck.
Delta watched the truck go from his guard position on the step before he finally turned and joined them on the porch. His normally gray eyes seethed with silver nanites.
Vic cleared her throat. “Don’t go all shroud on me,” she warned. “Stella needs her daddy.”
Delta let out a hard huff of breath. “She’ll have to learn to master her worst impulses too. She won’t have the forced conditioning and battle programming, but her Delta blank came with its own contingent of nanites, same as me, and she’ll have to deal with the differences.”
“Then she definitely needs you around,” Vic said firmly. “Not deported by planetary security for murdering Earthers, even ones that might sort of deserve it.”
Glad he wasn’t getting lectured, Cosmo took the moment to review the scene. “Who was the passenger in the truck? Was that Cross’s investor?”
Vic glanced at him. “I just saw his hand. French cuffs, very posh. So nobody from around here, I’m guessing.”
“I didn’t get a good look,” Delta said. “Seems odd that an investor would come all the way out here and then let Tanner Cross do the talking.”
“And then yank him back like a dog on a chain without closing the deal,” Vic said. “I think they didn’t plan to find anyone out here except Lindy.”
At her musing, Delta growled, and Cosmo figured if she’d said it earlier, Delta might’ve given permission to shoot. A shroud in service to his keyholder was a force to be feared across the universe.
A father protecting his daughter was worse.
Still, Cosmo couldn’t hold back his suspicions. “I don’t know about posh”—he slanted a glance at Vic—“but the passenger also had a ring.”
She nodded. “Big and sparkly, on his thumb, which in this country is pretty much always a sign for a pretentious, entitled jackwad.”
“Among shrouds, it means about the same because I think the passenger in Cross’s car was our presumed dead Theta.”
Chapter 4
When Delta sat down hard on the porch rail, Vic glanced between the matrix-brothers, not liking the shocked vibe. “Remind me. Which one is the Theta?”
Delta scraped one hand over his head, running harried waves through his copper-brown hair. “The most subtle and adaptive of us. The Theta of a matrix is often sent into a situation early to infiltrate and assess.”
“Data compiler and thief,” Cosmo added. “You’d like him.”
She glowered at him, wondering how a murderous cyborg thought he could insult her. “I borrow now, at worst.”
“Is borrowing how you got your IDA tech?” He lifted his eyebrows, which managed to be just enough darker than his pale hair to look mocking.
Wrinkling her nose in return, she shifted her attention to Delta. “If that was your Theta, why wouldn’t he come say hello? Why hide in the truck?”
“If it was the Theta,” Delta cautioned. “Ever since the crash landing, we’ve searched for wreckage. We never found sign of any other survivors and we salvaged everything, even the smallest scraps, so that we couldn’t be tracked down.”
“Unless someone already knew where we were,” Cosmo said. “Someone like the Theta. The stone in that ring looked like a keyholder’s crystal.”
And she’d thought Bollywood dramas were complicated. Vic rubbed her temple under the scratchy Rudolph reindeer hat. “But why would he want you to think he was dead?”
“Only the devious mind of a Theta could have a reason.” Cosmo pivoted toward the house. “Let’s go.”
“Go?” Vic followed him. “Where?”
“After the Theta,” he said impatiently.
Delta stormed around in front of them. “Wait.”
Cosmo mounted the rifle behind the door, back in its place. “Wait is too much like what,” he grumbled. “It seems that none of you
are much advanced beyond Stella.”
“It’s because you don’t make any sense,” Vic informed him, still stinging from the thief comment.
Delta slanted a chiding glance at her before putting his hand on Cosmo’s shoulder. “This world, and the life we want to live here, is more complicated than even a Theta’s most tortuous subroutines. Not everything can be solved at the hot end of a blaster.”
Cosmo scowled. “I put the blaster back already,” he said, pointing. “In case I’m wrong. We’ll go after him without a weapon. Well, without a visible weapon. Okay, without a visible alien weapon.”
Vic’s head whirled. “What weapon then?”
He grabbed the heavy coat he’d left on the rack. “Me.”
“You said we,” Delta reminded him. “But I can’t leave Stella.”
“If you’d let me enhance her development, she could go with me—”
“No.” Delta’s rejection was sharper than a gun crack.
Cosmo paused with one arm in his coat and flashed a crooked grin at the other shroud. The mischievous twinkle sent a weird little skip across Vic’s nerves. “Just kidding. I would not put her at risk. I gave her the best of all of the genetic material from you, Lindy, and Amber, and as the only Earther/Delta hybrid in existence, Stella would never be sacrificed on the field of battle like a common shroud.” He tilted his head. “According the database I recently downloaded from Vic’s tablet, because I gave Stella all her gifts, I’m basically her fairy godmother,” he informed them. He tilted his head the other way. “Actually, a Christmas fairy godmother.”
Vic sputtered. “Whaaaa…” She managed to stop herself from finishing the word, but still. “I think we need to discuss your understanding of that data.”
“We can do that while you pursue the Theta with me,” he told her.
“What?!” Okay, she couldn’t stop herself that time. “Me?”
“You’ve both made it clear to me that I cannot pass as an Earther,” Cosmo said, shoving his other arm into his coat. “So Vic Ray will be part of my disguise when we go out among the Earthers.”
She laughed. “Your disguise? If I go with you, it’ll be even more obvious that we’re not from around here.”
