by Elsa Jade
“Oh, Cosmo.”
He glanced over his shoulder, hesitating. “Do you think this is a bad idea? Worse than petting Wog?”
“No. I think it’s good. But…” She gazed up at him. “You haven’t known Vic that long. You haven’t really known anyone besides your brothers. Just…because something’s worth trying doesn’t mean it always works, okay?”
He narrowed his eyes. “So you think I shouldn’t try replacing the dates with raisins? How about ghee with butter?”
She sighed. “Let me look. I’m supposed to meet Lindy in town to babysit Stella while she and Delta do some Christmas shopping, but I have some time.”
It only took a few minutes to swap out the ingredients with what they had on hand and mix up a batch. Lun-mei sampled one. “Reminds me a bit of the taro and sweet potato balls my grandmother made,” she said. “I like it.”
He frowned at the spheres he’d carefully formed. “They are not the same as what Vic gave me.”
“We didn’t have all the exact ingredients, but these traditional recipes were intended to be adaptable depending on what was in season.” She cut another in half to share with the dogs. “Besides, the point is to show her you were paying attention.”
“I stole her data.”
“Okay, well, maybe don’t remind her of that part.” She dug into the pantry and pulled out a storage container. “Hey, this is perfect.”
The lid of the shallow tin depicted a horned ungulate with an illuminated red nose prancing across a full moon. A float-sled laden with elaborate wrapped cargo trailed behind. “Perfect,” he repeated. “She likes Rudolph.”
He hoped she was as fond of the other misfits, just like in the movie.
Lun-mei followed him out to the yard where he’d parked the scavengers’ surface vehicle. “Good luck with Vic.”
“Thank you.” He gazed at her. She had paler brown skin than Vic and darker brown eyes, almost black, and silky black hair instead of wavy brown—almost like Vic but with the contrast sharpened to an intimidating intensity. He could see why his Alpha had imprinted on her. “I know you aren’t sure about me because I might blow up your world. And because I keep trying to pet barn cats. But I want to be better.”
She gave him a lopsided smile. “I still try to pet barn cats too. You’d think the scars would give us a clue.”
He thought about that on the short flight back to Strix Springs, staying low to avoid detection since he didn’t want to explain to Mach if he was spotted by unwitting Earthers. He’d been wrong to discount her advice about Wog all those days ago, but… Why did she—a trained and experienced veterinarian—ignore her own words?
“Hope,” he said into the wind. “Because next time might be better.”
But as he approached Strix Springs, his nanites sent up an alarm. They’d detected a tracking beacon.
Cross’s belt buckle.
Cosmo landed out of sight on the treed hillside and quickly crossed toward the ranch house. Cross’s truck was in the yard, parked where Lindy’s had been.
A subaudible rumble equalized his nanites for battle. But he froze when he saw the Theta walk out of the house with his hand at Vic’s waist, pressing on the puffy silver coat.
Judging by the smile behind his beard, Lehigh had discovered the curves hidden there.
Vic was looking down at the data gel cylinder in her hand with unwavering attention; Lehigh must’ve brought her new code.
Compared to a not-bad-for-you treat made with all the wrong ingredients in a tin with rusted edges… Even from a distance, Cosmo knew he’d been beaten.
Don’t wait too long to tell her how you feel.
Considering that he’d been around more than a century, he hadn’t waited long at all. And Lehigh had known her even fewer days. But a Theta was meant to be quick and clever, and an Omega was…not.
“Back to Diamond Valley,” Lehigh called to Cross in the driver’s seat as he opened the back door of the quad-cab and gestured Vic inside. She went, never lifting her gaze from the tablet, and Lehigh slid in next to her.
Would they be Christmas shopping? Stopping by the goats in the town square? Singing some of the songs from her favorite holiday movies?
Cosmo watched as the truck wheeled out of the yard. Despite the bright midday sun bouncing off the snow into his eyes, making them sting, his nanites didn’t compensate, and the sight of her leaving seemed to burn into his retinas, charring all the way down.
Until only one hope for him remained: to leave himself lest he do something he might actually live to regret.
Chapter 11
“Swear you won’t hurt her,” Vic whispered. Her throat hurt from screaming, not that it had done any good.
“I told you I wouldn’t,” Lehigh said testily, his elegant veneer punctured—partly by the stylus she’d raked down his face when he’d grabbed her out of her office; too bad his nanites had already closed over the wound—but obviously aggrieved more by her pitiable Earther priorities. “As long as you give me the hack.”
Despair churned in her guts, more toxic than her old programming marathon diet of caffeine and salt. “I don’t have it yet. I’ve been trying.”
He tsked. “Have you though? Have you really?”
“Yes, I really have.” She glared at him even as she pressed back into the padding of the truck seat. “You couldn’t do it. In a century you haven’t been able to take control of the matrix.”
“I didn’t want it. Before now.” In the muted light through the tinted windows, only a faint silver line was visible across his cheek, although the bisected part of his beard was as white as the snow outside, and his green glare was poisonous. “You give me the shrouds and you get Stella.”
Just hearing him say it again made her want to throw up. “They aren’t mine to give.” She’d already told him that, but she needed to stall, to come up with a work-around for this rapidly cascading failure. “I explained all this. The code I have is meant to be a patch for the imprinting process, to overwrite that part of your programming. Not a way to exploit the keyholder subroutine and let you take over Mach’s and Delta’s bonds.”
He shrugged. “Admittedly, I’ve never seen a way to do it. Until you showed me the cipher. But as you told me before, if one path is love…the other path leads to death. That is where I want to go. And you’re going to chart the way for me.”
In the rearview mirror, Cross’s gaze met hers. His pale brown eyes were hazed with a hint of gray: Lehigh’s nanites. Even through that haze, though, she caught a glimpse of the horrified, bewildered Earther.
A dizzying roil of nausea and fear made her cling to the cool plasteel of the cylinder with the nanite-infused gel. The love cipher, that Lehigh wanted her to reverse engineer back into a m chain. No, worse—a weapon to break the bonds between the two shrouds and their Earther brides-to-be.
“You’re not an Omega,” she accused. “Why are you doing this?”
“Did Cosmo tell you why Omega shrouds are bought or taken as younglings instead of built from Delta blanks like the rest of us?”
She swallowed hard, tasting bitterness on the back of her throat. Cosmo had pushed her away because of his programming she couldn’t break through. She wanted to keep Troy talking, but like this? “No.”
“The consortium believed a bionic/organic imperson”—his mouth twisted—“could never have a truly exploitable death wish. They thought only desolation, embedded deep in memory, of losing love was the secret to creating an Omega—a being that would without hesitation end a world.”
“Not freely,” she protested. “Forced. By a code I’m trying to break. And you want to abuse for your own wicked ends.”
He inclined his head. “Yes.”
“So which are you: a mercenary or a monster?”
“A missionary.” He leaned toward her, his eyes flashing to silver. “One too long exiled from his god. I want to go home, Vic Ray, and I’ll be taking my brothers with me.”
The hot gust of his brea
th made her skin prickle, and she shrank farther back. “So go. Leave the others. Tell your consortium creators you lost them in the crash. That’s true enough.”
“Lost and found.” He settled back with a sigh. “You are young. Your world is young. You don’t see to the end. But I do. And the end has come for the consortium.”
She stilled. “End…the consortium?”
His smile was genuine this time, almost sweet—and all the more terrifying because of it. “Even gods can die. And who better to do the deed than the only shrouds ever to slip off their leashes. We will bite off the hands that made us.” His smile turned feral. “And the heads. And every other part. Like the parts they stole from us and replaced with numb implants and the whips of infinitesimal machine masters.”
A wisp of hope—about as tiny as a lone nanite—stirred in her. “But, Troy, that’s what I’m trying to do too.” Talking faster, she said, “Er, not bite off body parts or anything. But if I can hack the imprint code, then no keyholder can take control of the shrouds. All CWBOIs will be freed, and the consortium will be stopped.”
He laughed, a sound as bitter as a winter wind snuffing out a candle. “And when they change the code?”
She bit her lip until she tasted blood. “You think I don’t know that? I’m not just tweaking a single l-value. Ooh, shroud equals bad, free equals good. Out of their own nanites, I’m coding a self-replicating, upward cascading, command-level script that’s recursive with every iteration, so every time they go back to the drawing board with the merest atom of their previous work, they’ll see my tag: Victoria was here and you will never again steal a being away from themselves.”
As she finished, she realized she was leaning in on the Theta, almost snarling, and she sat back again with a thump.
It was a long moment before Lehigh laughed softly. “If passion alone swayed the universe, I would place my bet on you.”
“Didn’t know killer robots gambled,” she muttered, her cheeks hot with fury and unshed tears.
“We don’t, usually. Gambling isn’t any fun when you are the bet and you know you are always going to lose. But I’ve seen that doesn’t stop Earthers.”
He fell silent again, looking out the window on his side, and she had the strangest sense he was giving her a moment to compose herself.
When he swiveled back, his acid green stare was somber. “Shrouds don’t wish either. It’s not in our programming. But I almost wish I could set you loose on them. Sadly, the universe doesn’t listen to wishes, and wanting by itself won’t take you to the stars.” He ran a hand over his beard, stroking one finger through the whited-out scar. “How did you plan to infect the consortium?”
As cynically, saccharinely commercial as the IDA had sometimes been in their execution, the aspirations had always been pure. She swallowed. “I…still have contacts with the Intergalactic Dating Agency.”
He hummed under his breath. “And they would—what? Send you to the consortium’s undisclosed base where you could jack into some outlet with your viral self-love bomb? Or maybe you thought you could phone home remotely? Just need a number. Maybe you could fake a dating profile and get one of the consortium’s programmers to swipe right and let you jack in to them.”
With her face painfully hot, the rest of her body was so cold. “Maybe the universe is too big to mind, and the IDA doesn’t really have the power, but the transgalactic community doesn’t abide by—”
“Who do you think buys shrouds?” he roared. “The community”—he sneered the word—“that looks the other way while they infect themselves again and again with what we are. It’s not love that’s recursive and self-replicating, you naïve little Earther.” He leaned so close all she could see was the acid of his outrage. “It’s fear, greed, and hate.”
She couldn’t fight him, not with words, not even with her pointed stylus. And he’d shattered the tablet that she’d used to upload her backdoor access to his programming, though she wasn’t sure if that meant he’d found her incursion or if he’d just been violent to intimidate her. With his cybernetic strength, he could do whatever he wanted to her. And with his nanites…
Another glance at Cross made her shake and she didn’t say another word as they drove through town.
Diamond Valley Depot might be small, but its holiday spirit was mighty. The town square was decked out like a gingerbread village with each diminutive house representing a different religious tradition, sharing the spirit of the season with plywood-thin but genial goodwill, while the shops around the square leaned unabashedly toward economic freedom for all with a credit card.
Through the tinted windows of the oversized truck, it all seemed vague, far away, and Vic wondered if she’d see the new year.
Following the fancy street to Cross’s house felt even more strange—a case of déjà vu exacerbated by vague terror. When Cross steered the truck around the circular drive, she thought they might just keep going in circles forever.
That might’ve been preferable to Lehigh taking her arm and levering her out of her seat. She clutched the cipher cylinder closer. The contrary part of her wanted to drop kick it to the cobblestones. The plasteel cylinder wouldn’t break, but the gel within was as delicate as spun glass suspended in jello. Some, maybe most, of the connections would be shattered, and no matter how Lehigh threatened her, she wouldn’t be able to reform them.
Not without Cosmo anyway.
But if the cipher was the only way to get Stella back, Vic knew all the shrouds would drop kick themselves right back to the consortium.
All she had to do was code a work-around for this. Just like any other program, except all the shrouds and their lovers and a half-alien child were at risk … Nope, mustn’t focus on that. Simple, single-minded, stay strong.
Who did she know like that?
Channeling her inner Cosmo, she walked beside Lehigh into the big house. Her wary gaze immediately fastened on the car seat.
“Stella!” All but tossing the cylinder on the credenza, she rushed to the baby. She’d held Stella a few times, and changed one whole diaper, and that had been enough baby time for, oh, a decade, but now she wanted nothing more than to grab the car seat handle and run.
Although the baby was wide awake and looked up at Vic’s cry, she didn’t fuss. Not that she’d seemed particularly fussy before, but she’d had her mother and father nearby. Now…
“Stella?”
Lehigh cleared his throat. “I should probably warn you—”
Vic reached for the elfin baby, but before her hands curled behind the little nape and butt, she jumped back with a strangled gasp.
She looked down at her stinging hands but didn’t see anything. “What was that?”
The Theta grunted. “Good. I thought she just didn’t like me.”
Vic spun around to glare at him. “Did you electrify her?”
“No.” He tucked his chin. “What kind of evil robot do you think I am?”
She glared at him, outraged. “The kind who would electrify a baby, obviously.”
“Well, I didn’t. She did. Her nanites did, anyway. Some sort of instinctive protection.” He huffed under his breath. “Impressive.” When he squinted curiously at the baby, Vic’s own skin felt supercharged. “If you want a surefire decoy to deploy your virus…” At her gasp of horror, he waved his hand. “Hear me out.”
“No.” She shook her head until her hair flew. “No-no-no.”
“Even the consortium wouldn’t be able to resist a natural-born shroud that’s so cute.”
“No! She’s a baby.”
“So was I, once. So were the others of my matrix, even Cosmo. So are all the shrouds being built and torn apart and rebuilt right now”—he took a menacing step toward her—“while you argue with me.”
Stella gurgled and blew out a small cloud of pink nanites.
“So cute,” Lehigh murmured. “They’ll never have a chance…”
The cloud arrowed toward him with a high-pitched buzzing.
/> He jumped backward, swatting at the pinkened air. “Ow. Don’t—dammit!” He released a thin shield of his own, blocking the baby cloud.
The buzz dissipated as the microscopic attackers slowly failed.
“So, so cute,” he muttered with forced determination.
Vic’s throat tightened. “Where are her parents?”
“The Delta is in the basement, incapacitated. He expended his nanites while fighting off my mercenaries, allowing his keyholder to escape. But I was able to secure him and the small shroud. I have no doubt Lindy Minervudottir immediately sought out the Alpha. The Omega has been missing for a couple of days, but they’ll come for me even without him since I know they are tracking me.” He gestured at the incongruent belt buckle holding up his bespoke trousers.
“Can’t wait,” Vic muttered. Cosmo was missing? She knew he didn’t want anything more to do with her, but he’d never abandon his brothers.
“You’d better not wait. By the time they get here, you need to have mastered the imprinting code.” He twisted his hand to flash the thumb ring. “With the key—and a strong enough signal—you’ll send the override code to the other shrouds and open them up to my command.”
Overwhelmed, she sank to her knees beside the car seat, staring up at him in dazed loathing. “I can’t…”
But she could. As the gel cylinder rolled from her slack fingers across the pale carpet, she stared at the cipher within. She could see how it would work. She just had to…
She had to obey him. As if he held the key to her lock, and she wasn’t even a programmed shroud. She was just an Earther girl who didn’t know what was the right thing to do but couldn’t let a baby be hurt.
Staring past the shimmering threads of the love cipher, she studied the dark patches that still remained. With a sidelong glance, she reached out one finger to touch the curled toe of Stella’s elf pants. The baby kicked once, then smiled at her gummily. A tingle went through her, but gentle this time.
