by Elsa Jade
Although…going after Troy, she’d reclaimed parts of herself that she thought lost forever. Shouldn’t that have been enough?
Once she fought off the stasis he’d forced on her, she should’ve sung hallelujahs and aimed the liberated cruiser literally anywhere else. He’d given her his nanites, plus enough skills to fly wherever she wanted, not to mention a timely reminder that love didn’t stop the pain. What more did she need?
Apparently she needed him.
Or wanted him anyway. The same thing really, considering that she’d always had some trouble making good choices.
But she’d chosen him, dammit, and she’d always been greedy.
She simpered at the Theta blank that was wearing Troy’s face, gazing into his matte-black eyes. “And I want to be with you.”
Oh, she remembered this game well from the never-ending nights in the saloon. She might not understand exactly what was going on here in the station’s core, but she knew Troy had intended launching the cipher, and obviously it had gone catastrophically wrong.
His body was here, but it wasn’t…him.
She remembered that feeling herself. Under Jed James, she’d become intimately familiar with the pressure of an unwanted presence imposing on her private self, and without the whiskey and laudanum, it had made her skin crawl. This time, it was her very blood congealing. Something probed at the innermost sanctum of her being, prelude to an invasion.
The AI had obviously escaped the confines of its honeycomb cells. Although the gel holding a neural net didn’t normally interact with biological organisms beyond electrical tingles—at worst, a shock—now that she was half shroud, she had no doubt it could reach deeper into her than any of her callous cowboy customers. Maybe even deeper than Troy.
At the limits of her awareness, she heard tantalizing whispers. “Love… Peace… Perfection…”
For a moment she hesitated. Had the love cipher been activated? Was she blundering in where she wasn’t needed, and Troy had been right to leave her behind?
But no matter how badly the cataracts had damaged her vision, she’d never, ever been blind to the realities of love. Love was not always peaceful. Love was not perfect. She did not lie to herself that Troy was a good man, or even a man at all. But he’d seen something in her when she was at her lowest, drunk and drugged and despairing. And his kiss had given her the strength to survive this impossible intergalactic adventure.
At least up to this point.
She’d shared her favors and her infections carelessly in the past. This time she knew exactly what she was doing.
Boosting herself up to her tiptoes, she hovered her lips just beyond his. “I’m so happy I found you,” she murmured. “Never leave me again.”
“Never.” In the heartbreaking thrum of his voice, she thought she caught a glimpse of her Earthly Theta.
She kissed him hard and deep, until the root of her tongue ached with the strain. She might not have the cybernetic implants that allowed a shroud to jack into other tech, but she had her own ways of accessing their vulnerable systems. Shroud blanks were grown from the strongest, toughest phenotypes of many galactic species, which in her simple human experience often enough meant male. And she knew what to do with males. She’d fuck her way through the entire consortium to get what she wanted.
“Oh, Troy,” she moaned. Manipulative Thetas had nothing on a saloon girl. “Take me now.”
He clamped his hands over her hips, lifting her higher and spinning her around to settle her on the pinnacle of the comm control. The port poked uncomfortably between her butt cheeks. This could get awkward…
The thing masquerading as Troy stared deep into her eyes. “Beloved,” he murmured.
She searched for a flicker of silver in those merciless eyes and once again caught a glimmer of truth, a hint of her charming Theta, enough that she would never stop fighting to find him.
Because that was love too: the fight to stay together whatever the odds, not because they were perfectly matched or helplessly bound, but because they’d chosen each other—foolishly, maybe, but freely.
Framing his face between her hands, she threaded her fingers in the long strands, winding them tight, and pulled him close for a kiss.
Deeper, harder, and this time he kissed back, his tongue thrusting past hers. She closed her eyes and let him come.
Working the saloon, she’d mastered a few other skills. Lifting a carelessly unwatched coin here. Swigging from an unattended drink there. Replacing the missing parts of herself with whatever she could. Now… She would put Troy back together again.
Her nanites were depleted from struggling out of stasis and his were paralyzed or summoned out of him by the AI’s control. Wounded and struggling, yes, but they still had that connection.
As impossible as it had been to find her mother in the untamed west, as much as she’d sacrificed to track a missing shroud—this was worse. The AI was a black hole of information. Facts, figures, and feelings swirled around it in an event horizon of data points, threatening to suck her in and shred her to molecules of memories. Unearthing the stolen bits of Troy from the teeming, chaotic data was like searching for a diamond in a haystack.
Except…these diamonds called to her. All those times she’d searched for what she wanted, nothing had ever reached back. She maneuvered through the AI neural architecture as she’d once whirled through the saloon, avoiding the clutching grasps and stealing what she needed to stay alive. It was not easy, not safe, but it was a dance she’d mastered. She was stronger than she’d ever believed. Not just because of Troy’s nanites, but because of her own experiences. And beyond that, she’d become more than the sum of her parts.
And so was Troy. As she laid out the pattern of what he was, the pieces began to fall into place, finding their way back like iron filings to a magnet. In a little shadowed corner of the consortium net, blockaded by an interference pattern broadcast through the waning EM energy of their nanites, they huddled together.
“Must stop BlackWing.” Troy’s urgency was a rough whisper in her head. “It wants…”
“I saw it,” she told him. “Not all of it, but enough.” The endless army of Apex shrouds, converted from the innocent, imprisoned inhabitants of a thousand star systems, spreading across the galaxies with BlackWing’s lie of unity. She’d made bad choices, yes, but they were hers to make, and she rather thought she was doing better with her life. It had just taken some extra time.
“Cipher doesn’t connect,” he warned. “No matching pathways in the protocol now.”
Hopelessness distorted his voice, but even as the AI tried to strip them apart, Nell held tight.
“That’s not true. When BlackWing took you, every place you touched left a viral pathway for the cipher.”
“But the cipher code itself was destroyed. Nothing left. The weapon is gone.”
Lost in the electromagnetic maelstrom, fading, she had no body, no breath, but still she had this. “One place left,” she whispered. “In me.”
The flash of his shock boosted their energy, just a bit, enough to strengthen their bubble of solitude. “In you? I stole the cipher and locked it away. How did you—?”
“It’s not exactly the code,” she admitted. “Not a weapon. It’s the real thing.” His confusion was a murk around them, but on the other side, in the awareness she shared with Troy, she sensed BlackWing zeroing in on their virtual sanctuary. “Because I love you back.”
For a distant heartbeat, she wanted to rescind the confession. Why would she risk losing again? The bubble around them thinned, the universe of BlackWing’s gathered shroud souls peering in with a ravenous hunger that would tear them and galaxies apart…
If the fate of the universe couldn’t convince her to share her feelings…
She knew as much programming as the average intergalactic citizen, although she’d studied a bit more about cybernetics as she explored her unexpected shroud heritage. But she knew what a code should look like—explicit, exac
t, every line a command or response.
The love she shyly revealed to him was not the clear, hard diamond of the cipher. Hers was more like…a pixberry flower, delicate violet petals unfurling on a tough little scrub, each blossom a new chance, a sweet-tart promise.
“Nell,” he breathed. Once again, the surge of his response swelled through their haven and stymied BlackWing’s attempt to lock control on what was left of their selves. “It’s beautiful. I never imagined how love would actually look…or feel.”
Silvery lightning fractals unfurled through the gray fog of their shrinking bubble. From the silver coalesced the living colors of her Theta: the spring green of his eyes, a rich, dark lock of his hair, the sun-touched tint of his hand as he reached out to caress the blossom. The vivid hue of the flower imbued him with a blush as he pulled himself from the gray shadow of dissolution.
As he touched the cybernetic rendering of the flower, the petals burst apart in rainbow sparkles. “When I shared my nanites with you all those years ago, I didn’t know I was marking you.” His eyes glittered with the lingering sparks. “I believed a shroud’s only fate was death. Now you’ve given me another choice. And maybe saved the universe.” He held out his hand to her through the twinkling virtual stars. “But we aren’t bound by old codes. Do you choose me again? But only because you want me.” His lips quirked in that sly Theta smile. “Otherwise we let it burn.”
She lifted her eyes from his outstretched hand to his beseechingly imperious gaze. “The universe will always be in danger, somewhere,” she pointed out. When his arrogant gesture wavered, she smirked back. “But let’s save the burning for the whiskey…and the kisses.”
Just as she placed her hand over his, the bubble around them collapsed. BlackWing’s offensive security apparatus rushed inward in a tempest of EM radiation, as lethal in the virtual realm as the shrouds were on the outside.
With Troy and Nell standing back to back, the pix icon came to life. The thorny canes twisted around them, blocking BlackWing. Scattering violet flowers caught the virtual stormwinds and whirled out, each petal carrying the code of their love. Every node where BlackWing had chronicled and bound a bit of Troy’s programming—data on Earth’s biology and security, analytics on the performance of the Theta in question, even how to cowboy—contained an exploitable vulnerability to the touch of Nell’s love.
The AI had counterprogramming at the ready for nearly every contingency, but Nell’s version of the love cipher wasn’t a perfect code, powerful but static. Hers was a living thing. Just like the pixberry adapted and thrived depending on conditions it faced, so her feelings for Troy had rooted in less then perfect soil, angling around rocks to flourish as it reached for the sun.
Clinging to Troy as the cipher surged through the honeycomb, Nell imagined all the iterations of love: a child’s love for their mother, the love of coffee, her love for one small blue-green planet circling an otherwise unremarkable star that was her home—but mostly her love for Troy. A strange love, an unexpected love, a love she’d fought and then embraced with all her human heart.
And BlackWing had no way to fight back. With its terminal protocol, it had thought shrouds perfected as it pursued its end game. But love didn’t need perfection and acknowledged no ends.
With every virtual moat and wall that BlackWing conjured, the trajectory of the pix cipher entwined and embraced and overcame. BlackWing tried to contain the wild reach, forcing the waves inward, but the code wanted to be shared. It strained against the cybernetic chains, linking like a purple berry stain to every pulse of EM light that made up the cybernetic storm, each datapoint a message of love poised at the boundaries of their little bubble.
“Now?” Troy’s silver eyes were as bright as dew and dawn on a world far away.
“Always and forever,” she whispered.
He erased the boundary around their haven. For an instant, utterly empty of their nanites, they held each other in the real world, the blinding lights of the data gel cascading around them, and they were just Nell and Troy.
He stared down at her. “No code, no chance, and I couldn’t love you more.”
“I don’t need more,” she reassured him. “Just you.”
“Lost a few pieces to BlackWing,” he confessed. “Not sure I’ll get them back. My mental maps of mineral resources in Montana. The lyrics to American Pie—not sure why an AI would want that. My hope…” His lips brushed over hers in a soft smile. “But you have my heart.”
The wild crash of his kiss and the silent flash of the imploding bubble merged into one, blinding her to everything but him. Desperate, she held on tight, then even that tiny sliver of light went out.
Had they just…died? A faint halo of silver, like the most distant star, jolted a sob from her. “Troy?”
Just his one eye was lit with the nanite power that had once made him one of the most feared beings in the universe. Everything else around them was emptiness.
“What happened?” she whispered.
“I’m still getting residual messaging from the core. BlackWing is going to vent the station,” he warned. “The only reason it hasn’t yet is it’s distracted with shutting down the outgoing signal that’s carrying the pix cipher out to the Apex shrouds.”
“Why doesn’t it just block the commands?”
“It demanded perfect control of the terminal protocol. So all outgoing communiques have been instantaneous and simultaneous. The pix cipher is already spreading through the universe. And it’s altered the code at the root level.” His arms closed around her, the only warmth as the station began to freeze. “You did it, Nell. You freed the shrouds. Saved the universe. Found me when all was lost.”
Her throat seized. “Only one of those matters to me.” She gripped him back. “But I’ll take it all.”
The hold of his arms loosened, letting in the cold. “And now you have to go,” he said in a hoarse voice. “You have to leave me.”
“Not a chance,” she replied grimly. “Not after all this.”
“Nell, I don’t have enough strength remaining to make it back to the cruiser. Take my eye for light—”
She recoiled. “No! I’m taking all of you.”
“Nell, I can’t—”
“You’re more than your nanites and your programming,” she said fiercely. “You always have been, even if you never believed it. Now put that body to some use besides seducing me, and run!”
She hauled him to his feet, panic giving her an unexpected power.
He stumbled along with her a few steps. “Nell—”
“Save it,” she gasped. “And save me.”
“Funny, you never needed saving before.”
She wedged her shoulder under his arm and pulled his crooked elbow around her neck, a side by side embrace. “I never loved a killer robot turned savior before either.”
“Hmm, savior,” he murmured as he staggered along beside her. “Love savior. Yes, I like the sound of that.”
When she poked him in the ribs, the silver sweep of his eye lit just enough of the core for them to find the doorway out.
An ominous thrum reverberated through her heel bones up her spine to throb inside her skull. “What’s happening now? Is BlackWing about to blow the atmosphere?”
“Worse.”
She groaned. “Worse?”
“I’m guessing it’ll go for a hard reset, to jettison the pix cipher. But there’s too much power outside the gel core. It can’t pull all that back in without…”
“Without what?”
“Without expelling all the extra energy.”
Racing down the corridor, she didn’t have the breath to curse. “Boom.”
Troy chuckled, as if they were just idly promenading around the space station while they waited for the whiskey to decant.
And whiskey didn’t need to be decanted—
She tripped over something both hard and soft, realized it was a corpse, didn’t have the breath to scream.
Only bracing aga
inst Troy kept her upright, but they both careened into the bulkhead. The deep hum had fallen silent, and the station was deathly still.
Oh, why had she thought death?
“Nell, you have to leave me. It’s not too late—”
“It is,” she snarled. “I never meant to fall in love, but I did so it’s definitely too late. And you’re not getting away from me that easily.”
“It will be a significant boom,” he mused.
“So was falling for you.”
His grin flashed again, brighter than his one lit eye. “Think how bad it was for me. An Earther girl who took all my diamonds and then shot me. Repeatedly.”
“Only some of your diamonds. And you liked the rest.”
“I did,” he murmured. “I do. I will.”
In the silvery halo of his eye, she could see always and forever. But they were almost out of time.
Heaving back against his weight, she dragged him onward. The corridor of dead consortium staff had made her skin crawl. Now, it made her run. Somehow, she found the strength in her to half carry him, even as her knees shook from the strain and her breath strained through her gritted teeth in frantic sobs.
Troy’s taller frame was still bent above her, but the glow of his eye seemed to intensify. Or maybe she was just getting used to the dark.
No, she refused to stay in the dark anymore, not now that she’d seen the pix cipher winging out into the universe.
She forced her failing muscles to move. Every step was harder than the yearning steps that had taken her away from her home in search of her mother, more painful than the numbed steps that took her through her nights in the saloon, somehow farther than the FTL steps on the empress’s barge. She wouldn’t lose this time…
But when the open portal to the docking bay appeared in the fey light of Troy’s eye, she stumbled. What if it was just a whiskey dream or an opium delusion? A ghost across her own cataract-smudged eyes?
