I extended a manual network cable from a retractable reel hidden in my breastplate and connected it to the sensor cluster. “Barbas, I do need you. Without you, I would be alone and lost, and probably dead by now. To me, this isn’t a game, this is real. You’re real. You’re my qarin, and I’m going to help you come back to yourself no matter what it takes.” I hesitated, feeling foolish. Why did I feel silly though? Even if he didn’t have a body, wasn’t he a person? Wasn’t he real in his own way? I switched my data transfer processes on, letting my filters check the sensor package for any dangerous glitches or data before they opened up a path between my internal network and the one in the ruined array. “Barbas, I… I care about you. You need to know that. And it’s not just because you were put into my head to keep me from going crazy. You’re my friend. You’re the best friend I’ve ever had.” The connection stabilized, and a progress bar appeared on my HUD to tell me that the fragment of Barbas stored on the sensor array’s storage drive was being transferred over. I smirked; figuring the djinni in my mind could feel me doing it and get the idea. “Besides,” I said. “The sex is pretty great.”
Barbas laughed, and this time, it was really him that laughed. He laughed with the voice of the mocha-skinned, green-eyed, russet-haired Pan-American war veteran that his memories told him he was. He laughed like the man who had woken me up from the cold sleep of the Bullet into a world of warmth and comfort and joy like I had never experienced. He laughed, and once again, he was my friend, and my lover, and my closest confidante. After all, could someone really be closer to you than living in your own mind?
The progress bar in my HUD was full, and it flashed the word “complete” three times before winking out. I disconnected the transmission cable and glanced down the way I had come. It was a long way to the floor of the little cavern. The archive storage drives were further up the wall, on the other side of the rapidly narrowing shaft. They were actually only about ten meters away from me- if I had somehow been able to stand up in the air and walk straight towards them. I narrowed my eyes and grinned. “Hey, ‘Bas. You should probably hold on to your butt.”
“What?” Barbas stammered. “What are you-”
I pushed off from the wall as hard as I could and arched my back so that I turned a back flip as I soared over empty space to the opposite wall. The data archive was not actually all that large, a simple brick of solid state memory. It wasn’t actually attached to the ice-wall. It was actually just cradled in an impromptu nest of cabling. Instead of trying to grab a hold of the wreckage on the wall, I just reached out and seized it in one broad armored gauntlet, and twisted so that my feet were once again aimed at the floor. I knew I could land a fall of this distance with little trouble. Armor like this was rated to safely survive falls three times this high. And besides, I hadn’t had much time for fun in all this.
I dropped the thirty meters down to the cavern floor, whooping as I went and Barbas’ voice was a barely heard protest in my ears. We hit, hard, the impact absorbed easily by my augmented legs. Even so, I let my knees bend with the force of my landing, and dropped to one knee, bracing myself with my free hand to keep from falling forward with the surge of momentum. Still laughing, I connected my transmission cable to a hidden port on one of the sides of the cube of memory storage and waited for the progress bar to appear. It didn’t. “Barbas?”
“Joanna, something’s wrong with this.” He sounded confused, and a thin, cold wire of fear ran from my chest down into my stomach at the tone in his voice. Barbas was never confused.
“What do you mean? What’s wrong?”
Barbas didn’t answer for a moment, and all I could hear was my heartbeat in my ears. I opened my mouth to ask him again, but he cut me off. “The archive is here, it’s all here, but… I’m not. I know I was here, I know I was in the archive when the tower fell, but there’s no part of me here. And the data logs tell me that someone else was.”
That cold wire of fear shot its way back into my brain and propagated outward, like spider web cracks in the surface of my calm. “Who could have been in the archives? The natives here aren’t exactly big computer users. And I’m the only human on Chalice. Who could have gotten to the archives?” This didn’t make sense. What it suggested about the situation we were in- the cold fear in my mind finally hit my nervous system, and I felt the blood drain out of my face. “There’s something else here. Something at least as technologically advanced as us, and now it knows everything we know. It almost certainly knows more than we do.”
The terror was evident in Barbas’ voice, the hysteria I felt dwarfed by the existential crisis he had to be experiencing. “And they have part of me.” This was not good. This was so far from good, good wasn’t even visible anymore. We knew that we weren’t alone on Chalice, that the Erin-Vulur were just one tribe of a native species that probably lived in sub-glacial habitats all around the frozen moon. But this was different. Now we really weren’t alone on Chalice, and whoever was out there had some broken mirror reflection of Barbas.
I swallowed hard against the icy lump in my throat. “Did they… did they leave anything behind?”
Barbas responded immediately. “Yes.” His next words came out in a whisper, as if he was afraid that speaking them too loud, would make them more real. As if not fully acknowledging them would undo what we had just learned and would put the universe back the way it had been just a few moments ago. The way it was before… “Beneath,” Barbas whispered. “It just says, ‘We Are Beneath.”
...
Chapter Ten: Even Dead Gods Dream
Joanna
Sleep was a long time coming. I sat with my back against the ice, beneath an overhanging chunk of the tower, just staring at the archive where I had left it, sitting inert in the fractured ice. It was just a cube of data storage, inert and depowered. It couldn’t hurt me. But I watched it as if it was a viper, as though it was some kind of technological predator waiting to strike that was hidden in the shape of a simple hard-drive. What if whoever had been through our archives- whoever had taken part of Barbas- what if they had left more than a message? What if they had left some kind of trap? What did they want with us? What did they want with Barbas? Images of cables twisting out of the dark to strangle me were mingled with thoughts of many-fingered hands rising from the darkness, tipped in savage claws, already just behind me, already at my throat. I had been attacked on the surface, but as surprising as that had been; it hadn’t really scared me- not really. I fought for my life, and it was frightening in its own way, but it was ultimately explainable. It was concrete. There was nothing especially mysterious about it. But this? This was actually terrifying. It unsettled me, at my very core, and nothing felt safe. How could I feel safe? If there was something else on this planet, capable of accessing my technology, taking my data, and speaking my language, what else were they capable of? What could they want? What could they be doing, right now? I closed my eyes against the mounting headache that was clawing its way up out of the center of my brain. I needed to sleep, but how could I? How could I sleep with something like that out there? Who knew how close it was?
When I opened my eyes again, I was no longer in a broken, icy cavern, and I was no longer encased in armor. I put a hand to my head and felt the familiar waves of cascading black curls sliding through my fingers, and I smiled despite it all. Despite the fear, despite the uncertainty, Barbas was there. Even injured as he was, even diminished by whatever they had taken, he was still looking out for me. I was sitting on the deck of a boat, a sailboat- long enough that it was probably more like a yacht, and it was floating peacefully in an endless blue sea. Unusually gentle sunlight fell down on me, making the smooth wood of the deck warm against my skin. I was wearing a light, slightly translucent sundress, the same color as the bright lime margarita in my upraised hand, and nothing else. I wriggled my toes in the heat of the sun and enjoyed the way the warmth felt on my legs, on my arms, on the part of my chest exposed by the only partially laced neckline
. I knew it wasn’t real, I knew I should be alert, ready for anything, ready for-
Barbas stepped into my vision, not looking at me. His lean body was shining with a thin film of sweat as he stood at the edge of the deck and stared out over the water. His body was just as fantastic as usual, taut with tight, well-earned muscle, his shoulders broad and strong. His brown skin seemed to glow in the sun, as if it had absorbed some of the light and were reflecting it back out at the day through the shimmer of sweat. His russet hair had been cut down almost to the skin, on the sides of his head, leaving only a rusty shadow on his skin. But he had let some of the short, wavy hair grow at the top of his head, giving him something of a rugged, military look. His skin wasn’t perfect anymore, either. There were scars scattered across his broad back, places where it seemed he had been burned and cut, long ago. Maybe it was the legacy of his remembered history in the Pan-American soldadesca. After all, it was a part of who he was, just as much as my memories were. And who could say whose memories, whose past was more real? I could no more reach out and touch my old life any more than he could. Did that make him any less of a person? Did that make him any less real?
Barbas didn’t turn when he spoke, still staring out over bright, cheery ocean that stretched out of sight all around us. “I couldn’t make the cabin. There’s too much to manage with the forest, the lake, all of it. Too much of me would have to go into constructing it, and I am still very much diminished from my former self.”
I understood. “So you did the boat so that you wouldn’t have to construct a background more detailed than the surface of the sea.”
Barbas turned, smiling ruefully. “I’m afraid there’s no swimming on the agenda, either. Too much to simulate for it to work. I’m missing a lot of the processes that let me co-opt your subconscious, and without the help of your hind-brain, I can’t put together a whole world like I did before.” He gestured with one hand. “But I can manage a single boat and some margaritas. I figured you needed to relax. You’re afraid, and you feel cornered. You feel way out of your depth, and I don’t think the situation is going to get much better for a while. So I needed to get you somewhere you could breathe easy. Get you out of that suit for a while. Let your body sleep.”
“Aren’t you afraid too?” I asked, the cold wire of tension sliding into my thoughts again. “I mean, that message, the part of you that was taken- doesn’t that scare the shit out of you?” I looked down at the margarita in my hand, smelled the slight edge of tequila over the scent of the lime, and gratefully took a deep swig of the fruity drink. I let the alcoholic burn mingle with the soft tangy sweetness of citrus as it washed down my throat, and closed my eyes for a moment. “It sure scares the shit out of me.”
When I opened my eyes, Barbas was crouching next to me, his eyes level with mine, the thick, sweaty, masculine scent of him thick in my nose. I blinked and did a double take. He only had one eye, still bright and green as ever, reflecting the color of my margarita back at me along with a little inner ring of yellow fire that surrounded the pupil. The other eye was a cybernetic construct, a hard silver sphere, featureless except for a subtle double ring graven in it to suggest an iris and pupil. A scar bisected the eye, continuing down to touch the corner of his mouth, tracking back along his jaw and out of sight. “... ‘Bas?” I whispered softly, setting down my drink and reaching up to cup his scarred cheek. “What is this? These scars…”
Barbas bent and kissed me gently, slowly, the taste of him heady as wine, sweet as honey, strong as whiskey. He broke the kiss after a long minute and grinned with the unscarred side of his face. “I am… diminished, Jo. I was wounded in the battle. This is how I appear now. It more accurately reflects who I currently am.” He stood, wincing a little, and I realized that his right leg was missing below the knee, replaced instead with cunning prosthetic, a mechanical limb that looked and acted so much like the real thing. It was difficult to spot unless you looked right at it. I looked him over again, and the scars seemed to stand out again to me, each of them a strangely geometric, angular pattern, like the tracery of circuits on a silicon chip. They looked starker, more obvious, clashing with the bright festive Hawaiian pattern splashed over the shorts that were his only clothing. He watched me, carefully, waiting for my reaction.
I grinned at him and raised an eyebrow in an appraising look. “You look badass, ‘Bas and you know it. You probably also know I like a man that has been a little dirtied up, seen his share of the shit.” I searched his face. “But I don’t think that your injuries or my preferences are all this is about.” I ran my fingers along his stubbly cheek. “Am I wrong?”
Barbas sighed and sat down next to me. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that you can read me like that.”
“Not really,” I acknowledged. “You live in my head. We spend nearly every moment together. I think I know you pretty well.” Barbas turned his head to look out over the water again. I reached over and turned his face back to me with gentle fingers. “This is about Volistad, isn’t it?”
Barbas didn’t say anything at first, he just watched me with his mismatched eyes, his lips tight, and as if he was holding in words he wasn’t sure he wanted to say. He eventually spoke, hesitantly. “Maybe a little,” he admitted. “This is partially because of the damage to my personality matrix. I’m not lying about that. It makes it easier to see everything as real if what I look like better reflects how I feel, and I don’t feel whole. There are big parts of me missing, gone, and I don’t know where they are.” He looked down at the warm wooden deck between his knees. “But yes, part of this is probably about Volistad.” He sighed. “He’ has been on your mind a lot.”
“And that bothers you?” I asked, trying to keep the little flickers of a smile off of my face. “I mean, you live in my mind, and you can read some of my thoughts. So you must know why he’s on my mind.”
“He’s interesting,” Barbas admitted, a little glumly. “He’s a warrior; he’s clearly dangerous but clearly just as intelligent. He’s like what would happen if someone made some kind of arctic lynx into a person, or maybe a saber-toothed cat.”
“Yeah, he’s pretty intriguing,” I said, shrugging. “And even attractive, in a sort of exotic way. But he’s also not a human, and, more importantly, he’s dead.” A little ice crept into my voice when I said the word ‘dead’, and I found a surprising amount of anger hiding, deep within my chest. I didn’t know it was there. “At least that fucking Stormcaller thought so.” I gave Barbas a very direct look, which carried more than a little of that deep, swelling rage with it. “So it’s not like he’s a threat to you, even if I could leave the suit.”
Barbas winced. “I didn’t mean it like that.” He sighed. “Forget it. It’s stupid anyway. I should just let you relax, and get some sleep.” He moved as if to stand, but I reached up and seized his shoulder, and pulled him back down.
He hit the deck a little harder than I had intended, and he let out a little ‘oof’. “Oh, no,” I said, and this time, I knew the smile on my face was the tigress, not the shy little ward of the Pan-American state they had named Joanna Angeles. “You don’t get away that easily.” I seized his chin in my hand and pulled him close with easy strength. I might not have really been that strong without the suit in real life, but here? This was my head. Which meant my rules. I looked him right in the eyes and took a deep breath, smelling him; his sweat, his arousal, that bitter tang that I knew was fear. I spoke directly into his face, my breath hot where it reflected back to touch my lips. “You live in my head. You’re exactly what I want, by someone’s design- which, believe it or not, I really do appreciate. I’ve been alone before, really, really alone, and I learned a long time ago to take what I could get.” One of my fingers touched a vein running up the side of his neck, and I could feel his pulse beneath it. His heart was beating hard and fast. I smiled more widely. I liked that. “And if someone had told me about you before I was launched out into space, you would still be so much better than I could possib
ly have expected. You’re my friend, probably the best I’ve ever had, and I don’t care that you’re an AI, or a djinni, or whatever you technically are.” The smile dropped off my face, as suddenly as it came, and I put my lips to his ear, speaking through bared teeth. “But listen very, very carefully, Qarin,” I spoke the next words sharply, each one its own sentence. “You. Do. Not. Own. Me.” Then I released him, and sat back, letting the soft, easy smile of shy little Joanna Angeles return to my lips, letting the tigress fade back into the dark places, the shadows of my mind. I picked up my margarita and took a sip. “Understand?”
Barbas just stared at me for a long moment, breathing hard. “Yeah,” he said, a little dazed. “Yeah, I understand.” Then he leaned forward and kissed me, hard, moving to press me back against the warm wood of the deck. I let him. I wanted him as much as I had the first time I met him, maybe more so. He kissed me, and I kissed back, harder, tasting him. With some calm corner of my mind, I remembered to set down my margarita before I reached up and wrapped my arms around him, pulling him down.
I bit gently at Barbas’ lips as his hands roamed up along my sides to my neckline, his fingers teasing aside the already loose lacing. My body responded to him with eager intensity, and a small cry escaped my lips as a lightning bolt of sensation made its way up from between my legs and twisted up through my body. His lips closed on one of my breasts and his tongue traced quick circles around the nipple. But I didn’t simply surrender to the growing current of pleasure gripping me. Instead, I dipped my head and bit down on the side of his muscular neck, none too gently. He convulsed, letting go of my breast as he groaned. He looked up, his eyes wide, staring at me in shock. I smiled, and taking advantage of his surprise, I hooked one leg behind his and rolled us both over so that I came up on top. One of his hands was still tangled in the neck of my dress, and my sudden movement caused him to tear the thin fabric, ripping it down and leaving me naked to the waist.
Alien Romance Box Set: Romantic Suspense: Alien Destiny: Scifi Alien Romance Adventure Romantic Suspence Trilogy (Complete Series Box Set Books 1-3) Page 45
