by Elsa Jade
He was just big and scary. That was why she was reacting all strange.
Stepping away, his expression more blank than the shell, he gestured to the egg. “Listen,” he repeated.
The metal rim of the diaphragm seemed to burn her fingertips as she positioned it near the tip of the egg then down one side and the other. “I hear—” A thump sounded in her ears and she jumped back with a muttered curse.
His hand on the egg, Mach smiled, and she froze.
She’d thought he was too rough to be handsome, but the elation in his expression transformed him, like morning sunlight on the mountains. He glanced at her—she knew her jaw was slack—and as quickly as it had appeared, the joy vanished. The light winked out as if some massive blockade had shadowed the sun.
“That wasn’t a heartbeat,” she said, struggling to bring her own pulse under control again. “That was something pecking to get out.”
Chapter 3
He shouldn’t have called anyone. Mach knew that. He’d hung up almost immediately, rebuking himself, but of course the one time a call went through…
Involving any Earther in his secrets was dangerous. Mostly to the Earther.
And this one…
She was smaller than most, delicate and breakable, even if he didn’t mean to touch her. He’d mostly avoided female Earthers for that very reason. Avoiding females had the added bonus of readily eliminating half of all problematic interactions with male Earthers over the years. Calling Doc Green had been a thoughtless moment of panic when the egg had stopped making noise, but seeing Doctor Chien Lun-mei had brought all sorts of unfamiliar thoughts seething back.
No. These weren’t thoughts. They were feelings.
Feelings that should’ve been exterminated by his early modifications and training, definitely should’ve gone extinct over the last century.
But like the egg, the doctor was bringing his feelings to life.
May. While she listened to the egg again, he rolled the simple word around his head like a perfect sphere. It didn’t fit her. Too simple, too perfect. Lun-mei was closer, adding complexity, an element he didn’t recognize even though he thought he understood these Earthers: posturing, aggressive, patriarchal. She’d slipped past his defenses being none of those things.
And now she had her hands all over one of his secrets.
“We need to warm it up,” she murmured.
He frowned. He already felt unnecessarily warm around her.
“And increase the humidity.”
She was talking about the egg. “After bringing it out of cold storage”—the closest she’d understand to stasis—“I didn’t want to shock it.”
“Birth is always a shock, like any transition between states. All we can do is ease the change.”
The soft cadence of her voice, with a lilt that didn’t sound quite like any other Earther in Carbon County, lulled him, and Mach brought himself up short. He needed her soothing for the egg, not himself.
“If you can’t tell me anything more about the provenance of the egg…” She peered at him expectantly.
He shook his head. He knew more, but he couldn’t tell her.
Artificially erasing her memories after this was going to be troublesome enough without adding layers of time and detail.
“Okay, I wish I had time to do more research, but there’s no way we’re streaming data out here.” She paced halfway around the egg. “And I know we don’t have any references at the office. So the best we can do is treat it like a chicken.”
He forced himself not to react. They weren’t going to hatch a chicken.
“We need heat and humidity.” She glanced around. “No chance you have an incubator? A giant incubator?” When he just gave her a look, she sighed. “Bathroom then. We need a sling and a hand cart to move it.”
“I can carry it.” He shrugged out of his heavy Carhartt to get a better grip.
She whisked forward to pluck the coat from him and wrapped it gently around the lower bulge of the egg. “Here. Take the sleeves. Right, like that. Be careful you don’t put too much pressure on any one location. Good thing you’re so big yourself…” She bit her lip. “Sorry. That was rude.”
“Just the truth.” He hefted the egg carefully into his arms. “To the house.”
She followed him across the yard but as they approached the steps up to the porch she hurried around him. “Let me get the door.”
“I have dogs.”
“I’m good with dogs.”
Right. When she opened the door, Chip and Pickle surged out, not barking for once. They’d been uncharacteristically quiet ever since he and Delta had removed the egg from the pyramid once it was clear the stasis field was deteriorating with no hope of rebooting. The imminent-failure alert had been low-powered and erratic after all these years, but the not-zero chance someone—either on this world or elsewhere—might receive it was unacceptable. So Mach opened the pyramid.
Now the dogs and Delta both avoided the barn where they’d moved the egg. Mach knew Delta thought he was going to destroy the egg. And maybe Delta thought the rifle would be turned on him next. Mach regretted the suspicion he’d inadvertently triggered in the last member of his matrix. Although that wasn’t the reason he’d decided to save the egg.
He wasn’t sure why he needed to save the egg. And he didn’t like his own suspicions.
As for the dogs, they were rightly scared.
Moving the egg into the house was a terrible idea, but if the doctor said it was necessary, he’d do it.
She’d stopped just inside the front door, letting the dogs mill around her uncertainly. They were working dogs, not prone to random biting, but not friendly without good cause.
From one of the many pockets on her heavy work coat, she produced two biscuits and displayed the heart-shaped treats between her slender fingers.
Chip sat at once, and Pickle’s butt was a heartbeat behind. Okay, yeah, there was the good cause.
“Who’s the good boys?” she murmured. “You are the good boys.”
She didn’t try to pet them, though Mach wondered how she resisted. After she gave them their treats, they were gazing at her in that way of dogs who’d found not an easy mark but a worthy leader.
When she lifted her gaze to his, her voice was normal again, with just that slight lilt he finally pinned down—it was like the dark-haired folk he’d briefly worked alongside building the primitive railroads across this land. “Which way?”
He’d all but forgotten the egg in his arms. Instead of replying, he turned down the hall from the entry. Originally, the house had no bathroom, at least not one indoors. He and Delta would’ve continued that way indefinitely except a long-ago visitor had laughingly remarked that they must prefer the old ways. Not wanting to call attention to themselves, they added several bathrooms during one of the updates.
He strode to the nearest one but paused when he realized Lun-mei wasn’t behind him. “Doctor?”
“Wow.” The low whistle of her breath made him look over his shoulder.
She was staring past him. He followed her gaze warily. “What?”
“Wait, was this place a Russian Orthodox bordello? That would totally explain the aesthetic going on here.”
He scowled around at the veined marble, brilliant blue paint that recalled his first glimpse of this planet, and red highlights. “This is fine. This is normal. I saw it in a magazine.”
“You made this?” She turned a slow circle, eyes wide. “Was the magazine by any chance Russian Orthodox Bordello Weekly?”
He wasn’t going to tell her he had the first editions of Analog Science Fiction and Fact out in the maintance shed somewhere. Probably next to the other stasis pyramids. “This is getting heavy,” he lied.
Flicking on the infrared heat light overhead, she peered upward. “Definitely bordello.” Then she bustled forward. “Towels?”
“In one of the cabinets.”
“One of,” she muttered. She leaned over, searching t
hrough the many drawers, and his gaze settled on her curved backside.
She was smaller than any adult Earther he’d encountered, even back in the days when calories were harder to obtain. But she was exquisitely formulated for harmonious balance. Unlike himself who’d been designed for murder and mayhem.
He forced his stare down to the egg. She wasn’t created in a lab. She was real.
When she turned back to him, he almost flinched, as if those dark eyes of hers would see something he’d kept hidden. Besides the egg, besides his freakish size.
But she only hefted the linens for his inspection. “These look like dog-washing blankets. Okay if they get messy?”
Those were his towels, actually, for when he got particularly dirty and his nanites needed assistance keeping him maintained. But he wasn’t going to admit that now. “Fine.”
She made a thick pad on the bottom of the bathtub. “Okay, I can see how he’d need a large tub,” she muttered, more to herself, he thought, than him, as she turned on the spigots and adjusted the temperature. “But gilt, really?”
He also wasn’t going to tell her that was an element he’d mined himself during the Gold Rush.
Standing back, she gestured to the bedding. “Set the egg there. Where I heard the knocking—here—position that point upward. Normally an egg would be constantly turned until the last few days before hatching, but since we can’t know…” She flashed a look at him, not quite a smile, but her eyes glinted. “Unless you’ve been sitting on it secretly.”
“My backside would crack it.”
For a moment, her eyes widened. Then she laughed, a gentle sound that flowed around him like the water. She bent again to shut off the spigots, and he kept his gaze studiously elsewhere, but the soft echo of her amusement seemed to keep going in his head.
“We don’t want the shell getting soaked,” she said, settling on the edge of the tub, “and definitely don’t want to drown the chick when it emerges, but this will bring up the humidity right away.” She ran her hand over the upper curve. A hard knock from inside visibly rattled the egg, and she laughed again. “Yeah, yeah. We hear you,” she said in the same voice she’d used for the dogs. She glanced at Mach. “I wasn’t present for the emu hatching season, but most chicks need a source of constant heat, good ventilation with no breeze, chick feed.” She frowned. “But I don’t know if it will need more vegetative pellets or higher protein or—”
He touched her shoulder. “Let’s get it out of the shell first.”
She looked at his hand then up at him. Abruptly, she stood, the motion knocking his hand away. “Right. Well, we probably have at least a few hours before it can peck its way out, judging by the thickness of the shell.”
They blitzed the house and his workroom, rounding up a shop light that would fit the infrared bulb in the bathroom—“Gotta get the heat closer to the baby,” she told him—plus a couple shallow saucers for the “baby” to drink and eat out of. He didn’t have the heart to tell her that he’d probably be slaughtering one of the full-grown cows in the pasture to feed the hatchling. If the matrix Beta had survived the crash, maybe he would’ve known how to make the birth less traumatic for their new matrix member. Mach was risking everything just to keep it alive.
Actually, the doctor was doing all the work. Even though he wasn’t telling her everything. Guilt pinched at him like an ill-fitting shell. He didn’t like this surge of feeling triggered in him. Staying alive, keeping the tatters of his matrix alive—that was the bedrock core of his programming. His specialized skills had been deactivated until he was claimed by their keyholder. But since the crash-landing, when the violence of the fall broke their stasis, they’d all been stuck in their baseline encoding: Stay alive. Kill when necessary. Wait for retrieval.
He couldn’t disobey directly, but he could manipulate any situation so he didn’t have to act on the more objectionable parts of his programming. Ever since he’d found this place for them in the middle of nowhere on this backward planet, he’d kept them alive and free. That he’d hesitated even for a minute with this addition to their devastated matrix shamed him. But Lun-mei was helping him make it right.
They checked on the egg in the bathroom again, piling their found treasures near the tub. She pressed her stethoscope (such a primitive tool) to the shell, half closing her eyes. “Where are you?” she whispered. “Taking a little breather? Let us know when you’re ready to come out.”
She sat back and gazed at him, blinking in the way that he’d come to recognize as sleepiness. “We still need to find it something to eat,” she said, rising to her feet and swaying just a little, like the egg rocking. “If I leave now, I can get to the feed store and find something to tide us over until I can do some more research.”
He rose too, wanting to take her elbow to steady her. But she’d shrugged away from him last time when he’d touched her shoulder, so he kept his hands to himself. “The feed store won’t open for another couple of hours,” he pointed out. “How about coffee instead?”
She perked up so fast he thought her ears actually twitched through her silky black hair, startling a laugh out of him. Shortly after the ship had crashed, he’d figured out how to chuckle and guffaw and sometimes smirk in order to fit in with the rough men they’d found themselves among. But he wasn’t sure he’d ever laughed with genuine humor, and he put a hand over his belly to hold it there.
She wrinkled her nose at him. “What?”
He mimed her eager look. “Chip and Pickle do that when I say donut.”
“You have donuts too?” The question was almost a breathy moan, and his urge to laugh was swallowed up by something darker and deeper in his core.
He tried to shake it off. “No donuts,” he said. “Gave them all to the dogs.”
She shook her head, her lips pursed into a little O of disapproval. “Some vets would tell you that people food is strictly forbidden for dogs,” she said severely.
“I don’t think you’re one of those,” he said.
She gave him another look. “Okay, you’re right. But still, you should at least give your dogs more dignified names, and you should always save a donut for me.”
“All right,” he said.
She bit at her lip, bringing a flush of blood to the surface that wasn’t as red as his “bordello” but wasn’t so different either. The color was intriguingly bright against her golden-brown skin. “Not that you owe me a donut,” she said hurriedly. “The after-hours fee will be entirely enough.” She turned to give the egg one last pat, a proprietary gesture that he somehow felt in his own body. “At least you won’t owe me a fee for tricking me.”
If only she knew.
All the feeling drained out of him.
No one could know. That was the only way to keep his surviving matrix alive.
Chapter 4
As Lun-mei followed Mach through the bizarre house, the dogs slipping along behind them, she couldn’t help but peer around nosily. But really, it was a bizarre house. When she thought of all her grade school chums who declined to come for a second play date because they thought her house smelled funny and the snacks tasted weird… She shook her head. No wonder the old rancher earlier in the evening had told her no one would “get” the Halley boys. The whole last hour and a half had been impossible to believe.
But Mach was desperate to save his pet—or his livestock, she wasn’t sure which the egg was—and that she understood better than anyone. If she’d had dogs like Chip and Pickle (what kind of names were those anyway?) when she was growing up, those lonely years with no playmate but her sister wouldn’t have been so bad.
To her disappointment, the kitchen was little more than standard-issue working ranch generic. She’d expected at least a disco ball or something.
But the sight of the typical massive ranch coffee pot was better than any Architectural Digest surprise. Mach gestured her toward the kitchen counter and set about grinding some coffee beans.
Settling on the padded stool
with the dogs curled at her feet, she raised one eyebrow. “That’s a little fancy for this part of Montana.”
He tipped the bag of coffee beans toward her, wafting the delicious scent across the counter. “You can chew the beans if that makes you feel more…manly.”
She snorted. “I’ll have you know I’ve never once tried to be just one of the boys.” She held her hands out to her sides as evidence. “I couldn’t even fool myself that would ever work.”
His dark brown eyes flashed with the eerie silver she’d noted before and then forgotten in the light of crazier discoveries, and he took her invitation to study her. She let her arms drop, a flush of embarrassment heating her more efficiently than any cup of coffee. Sheesh, she might as well strut around in front of him. And she never strutted; that would be just too bantam rooster-esque and she considered herself more tough guinea hen.
But he didn’t leer as she suddenly feared he would, just nodded, his expression somber. “I know what it’s like for no one to see you for what you are,” he said in a low voice before returning his attention to the coffee maker.
She gazed at him, surprise replacing her embarrassment. What did he want people to see besides the huge, brutally featured man before her?
Since he’d left the big Stetson on the other counter stool, revealing thick waves of mink-brown hair that unfairly resisted hat-head, she had the chance to really see him as he was looking at her. For some reason, she’d thought he was older, but judging by the firm line of that oversized jaw and the smoothness of his skin under the scars, Mach couldn’t be that much older than she was, so not even thirty yet. Considering that the average age of Montana ranchers was almost fifty-nine, probably he felt as out of place sometimes as she did.
She curled her lips inward. Well, she’d always wanted to be recognized for more than her gender, size, race, or expected grade point average. And here she hadn’t even wondered who he was other than a fascinating new case.
When he brought her a three-quarter-filled mug, she smiled at him. “I can’t say thank you enough.” She wrapped her fingers around the warm ceramic. “This smells and feels divine.”
