Theta: Intergalactic Dating Agency (Cyborg Cowboys of Carbon County Book 4)

by Elsa Jade

  “I am in the mood,” she snapped. “The mood to get off this moon and back to…” She chewed at her lower lip, adding a flush of red Earther blood to the faint purple stain of pixberry.

  Ah yes, back to what exactly? He to his toxic brew of coldblooded vengeance, she to a freedom that mostly sounded like loneliness.

  He took another quick drink of his wine for courage and set aside his cube. “Likely I’ll survive without the extra nanites. It was a long shot anyway, and since we’re not getting drunk, maybe we shouldn’t gamble either. I—”

  She closed the distance between them, wrapped her fingers at the back of his neck, and pulled herself up to a kiss.

  With him barefooted and her still in her boots, the difference between them was lessened, but still she drew down hard on his nape to bring them close. The dominating grip sent a strange quiver down his spine, as if she’d jacked into some primitive bit of his code that should’ve been excised long ago by the consortium programmers.

  The mate pair bond that the consortium had tried to circumvent for their keyholder imprinting didn’t care who had paid for him. It sought a match for its need, its pleasures. Nell was that—and more. She already held a part of him as intimate as his blood and bones.

  Anchoring his forearm at the small of her back, he boosted her up higher against his chest, deepening the kiss. But the aggressive, open slant of her mouth under his unnerved him. Like the pilot of a powerless ship staring down an endless gravity well, out of control, he could only hang on tight.

  This wasn’t how he’d planned their kiss. Yes, he wanted the new infusion of nanites, and he needed all his strength and cleverness to get them off this moon, out of the empress’s clutches, so he could finally face the consortium. But he couldn’t take it this way, stolen from Nell even if she’d offered it first. Such a kiss would fail, as he told her.

  And it was wrong.

  When had he gotten a moral code? Just another alien Earther infection, maybe. There had to be a remedy for it. Many other beings in the universe had faced troublesome moments where they felt the urge to do the right thing but still managed to come up with a cynical strength to do the right thing for them.

  But at this moment, it was just him and Nell on this empty moon with its thin veil of atmosphere and struggling pixberry bushes that might one day nurture lives and families and livestock, hopes and dreams. Just the two of them…

  When their teeth clicked, so did something inside him. Reaching up, he cupped the rigid cant of her jaw. He eased back and traced just the tip of his tongue over the plump, hot flush of her upper lip where she’d bitten herself several times.

  How could he say he was sorry again in a way she’d believe? With gentle suction, he hoped to lure her desire to the surface, wiping away the pain, her uncertainty about him, their even less certain future. Shrouds were strike forces, expendable nonentities in other beings’ wars, so he knew he didn’t have much—wasn’t much himself—but he could give her this moment with everything he had in his raw, primitive code.

  He urged her back against the curving bulkhead, skimming one hand upward to curl around the back of her head. The first breath of night air eased through the hatch and down the corridor, whispering over his damp hair.

  Its tickle should’ve been a touch of common sense to cool his ardor. He was getting too caught up, raw biological instinct overriding his advanced programming. He couldn’t get what he wanted from this moment, not when she was still so angry and suspicious. He should stop, regroup, try again when he’d softened her up properly.

  But her hard jaw and prickly suspicions and snappish words had enticed him somehow, in ways he couldn’t understand, when understanding the situation and manipulating it were the crucial skills of his designation.

  Because she was a challenge, he told himself, when he’d had more than a hundred years of little to challenge him. Until his own matrix had defeated him, of course. But he wasn’t counting them because they were shrouds, just like him.

  A stab of wistfulness made him break the kiss and he tipped his forehead down to rest against Nell’s crown. He’d left his brothers behind, would never see them again. But hopefully his private war against the consortium would guarantee that the lives they’d made on the small, backward planet of Dirt would be everything shrouds had never known they could want.

  Just as he’d never known that he could want a true-love kiss.

  Nell’s gusting breath warmed the bare skin of his chest exposed by the half-open robe. “Is that it?” she muttered. “Did you get them?”

  As if he might’ve hoovered up the nanites from her tonsils. He brushed his lips over her hair. “I’m not sure. I got something.” A conscience, much to his chagrin.

  “Do we need…” She licked the lush curve of her lip, retracing the path his mouth had taken. “Do we need to keep going?”

  He had prayers to a few hundred gods available in his programming and curses in a thousand languages more, but he didn’t know how to answer this question. Want? Yes. But need?

  Gods and curses, yes, he needed.

  Instead, he said, “It’s almost dark. We should make sure we have all our emergency gear and close up the hatch.”

  She let both her hands fold between their bodies, her fisted hands resting against his pec. “But you said this was an empty moon. There’s nothing out there, is there?”

  “Nothing here,” he agreed.

  And if he didn’t come up with a way to make something between them, he could kiss her and his chance for revenge goodbye.

  Chapter 7

  As she finished setting a few of the solar-powered emergency lights around the shuttle, Nell couldn’t seem to stifle her daydreaming sighs as she thought about that kiss.

  Had Troy gotten some of his nanites back? That would explain the weakness in her knees.

  Wouldn’t he have known if it worked? And if it had, wouldn’t he have commandeered the ship like the lethal shroud he was?

  Instead, he was hooking up one of the emergency power cells to keep the bathroom operational while the ship’s main lines were down.

  “All done,” he told her as he sauntered down the corridor toward where she sat in the pilot’s chair, contemplating the night. “When the sun rises in a few hours, I should be able to finish up, no problem.”

  “And no problem with your wounds?” She swiveled the chair toward him to gesture vaguely at his chest. Just glancing at that smooth expanse of muscle made her knees quiver again even though she was sitting down.

  He leaned one shoulder against the doorway of the bridge, gazing past her at the viewscreen. “I seem to be surviving.”

  That comment all but invited her to assess him in her borrowed robe. The hand-loomed plasilk was so fiercely feminine that he should’ve looked ridiculous, as out of place as a cowboy in a velvet corset. But of course a Theta would look right in anything he chose: seductive spy and assassin of common sense.

  She shouldn’t be so intrigued by him, not when she knew what he was. But the attraction was more than his consortium-engineered charm. Their shared history in a long-ago time and place, not to mention the unforeseeable circumstances that had made her attuned to his nano tech, had forged a link between them she couldn’t deny even if she wanted to.

  And she didn’t want to.

  Most of her years had been spent doing the bidding of others just to stay alive. From avoiding the angry peck of the farm chickens so that there’d be eggs to eat, to convincing horny cowboys that she cared enough that they’d leave her an extra coin, to dancing for the empress (thank heavens she’d watched the cancan girls in between her drunken customers), she’d been keenly aware that she survived only at the whim of others. So she’d taken this one kiss—well, a few kisses, but this one shroud—as something of her own, just for one night. That seemed only fair, didn’t it, in a universe that seemed to have no particular affinity for fairness?

  It had been more than a century since she’d told anyone about her mo
ther’s abandonment, and maybe the unearthing of those old, unwanted memories was what dredged up the sound of her mother’s voice in her head.

  “You can’t let the rude cock know you’re afraid,” her mother had tsked one night over a tearful recitation of the day’s scratches from the feisty old rooster. “You just gotta take what’s yours.”

  Little Nell then had considered the eggs belonged to the chickens, not to the rooster or her. But she knew better than to talk back to her mother. With seven children in the home, no one got to say what they really thought.

  Big Nell now cringed at the realization that she was treating Troy as little more than an egg, just another commodity to keep herself alive. Was she really selfish enough to give him to the empress at the end of this journey?

  Turning away from him, she sacrificed one pulse of their emergency power to send out a scan of their immediate surroundings. Nothing out there, just as he’d promised.

  She wrapped her arms around herself, feeling…small. And alone. Not a new sensation, but emphasized anew by the stark emptiness of the blank scan.

  “When you power up tomorrow, you should fly away,” she murmured. “Just point the ship out into that blackness and don’t look back.”

  She heard no sound, but she flinched as his hands came around the frame of the non-species-specific pilot’s chair and settled on her shoulders at the base of her neck. His thumbs smoothed upward, as if he could erase the tension knotted there.

  “That’s the plan,” he said. “Just gotta wait another couple hours.”

  “No.” She tipped her head forward, in surrender or wordless demand for more of his touch she wasn’t sure. “I mean you should leave me here.”

  The soothing circles stopped. “Why the hell would I do that?”

  Even as his grasp fell loosely to the sides, her throat tightened. “I don’t want to give you to the empress.”

  “But I thought that was your plan.”

  “Yes, I must give you to the empress.”

  “All right then? What’s the trouble?” He edged around her chair to take the co-pilot seat beside her.

  In the wan glow of the emergency lighting, his green eyes were darkened to the same brooding hue as the uncut forests between the farms back in her day, where a chicken or a child or a discontented woman could walk into the shadows and never be seen again.

  Would he do that to her? Walk away? She swallowed hard past the constriction in her throat. “I don’t want to be like them, like the cowboys or the empress, who just…take what they want without a care for the beings who can’t say no.”

  He sat back in his chair, staring out at the quiet moon as she had—like the two of them were flying this dead ship into the darkness. Out of power. Out of plans. Out of possibilities.

  “Here’s the thing, Nell.” His long fingers clenched around the generic limb support bars hard enough that his knuckles blanched. That hadn’t happened even when they were falling through the atmosphere. “I need to go to her. If she inherited her grandfather’s assets, she has my activation codes.” Though he didn’t move, in the gloom of the bridge, a glint of silver flashed through his eyes. “Those are mine. And I want them.”

  Nell’s heart skittered a beat. “Purge the nanites. You’d lose your strength and longevity, some of your skills. You wouldn’t be Theta anymore. But you’d be free.”

  For a moment, he sat silent, as if he were considering, but then he sighed. “I was made, not born. Without nanites, my synthetics would decay. More than half of me would die, including my brain. Going after my code gives me a chance. That’s not much, but it’s something.”

  “If the empress activates you, she owns you.” She shook her head. “You don’t want that. Trust me, you don’t.”

  He loosened his grip on the chair, scrubbing his palms back and forth on the plasteel. “She won’t—can’t. Not if I’m already owned.”

  Nell tilted her head. “Already owned? By whom?”

  “By you.”

  The short words thudded through her like the two-beat syncopation of her heart. “By me? But—”

  “Not yet.” He frowned down at his hands as he seemed to notice his own restless movements. “At least…I don’t think I’m yours yet.”

  “You don’t think?” She hadn’t meant to let her voice rise like that, but his evasion made the hairs at her nape prickle. “I didn’t buy you. I don’t have your activation codes. You can’t be mine.”

  With a sidelong glance at her, he pushed out of his chair and strode back down the central corridor. How did he manage to make her bathrobe look so elegant?

  Dismayed at her thoughts wandering like a hungry stray kitten in his wake, she jolted up from her seat and chased after him. “Troy, what do you mean I might own you?” She stumbled over nothing; the deck was smooth and the gravity effortless, but her whole world was tumbling around her. “I don’t want you.”

  He wheeled to face her. “Now you have to be honest?”

  She winced at the frozen stillness of his expression. “I don’t want anyone,” she clarified. “Some beings just shouldn’t care for others.”

  “Like your mother didn’t care for you?”

  She recoiled. “I made sure no one was ever dependent on me, no one was ever waiting for me.”

  “You weren’t even taking care of yourself when I found you.”

  The truth stabbed deep. “And yet somehow meeting you made it worse.”

  As soon as she said it, she regretted it. This wasn’t a cruel cockfight or one of the hair-pulling, clawing spats between desperate working girls. She and Troy were doing this to themselves.

  Yielding to the impulse, she reached out to rest her fingertips on his chest just beyond the painted streak of gel. “Wait. Stop. I don’t want to fight you.”

  “Right,” he muttered. “Now that you have the upper hand.”

  Did she? That was…rare. “Explain why you would be mine.”

  His pectoral muscle flexed hard, as if he was trying to pull away but couldn’t, even though it would be impossible to restrain a shroud with just a touch. “You already know that a keyholder—in my case, your empress—takes control of the matrix with the master code bought from the consortium.” When she nodded, he continued without looking up. “It turns out, the protocol used to command shrouds can be subverted without any formal programming or payment by the very primitive foundation impulse known to Earthers as…basically, true love.”

  She blinked, his explanation swirling in her head. And she wasn’t sure which was more bewildering: the details of cybernetic indoctrination or the idea that such an emotional myth as true love might actually exist.

  “So…if you…love someone else, the empress can’t take control of your programming?” Was it her pulse rushing so hard she felt it in her fingertips, or was it his heart pounding? “How is that even possible?”

  “The imprinting code exploits a biological process that would otherwise trigger mate bonding. The consortium engineers never recognized the flaw since shroud blanks aren’t supposed to feel anything, not the urge to mate, definitely not love.” His mouth twisted. “But when we find someone who makes us…feel, it inoculates us against the control of the keyholder coding.”

  The hollow thudding in her ears fell silent, like transsolar engines suddenly, terminally cutting out. “So, you’re saying that you…love me?”

  He stood tall, staring down at her, and all the other muscles in his honed body displayed by the silky robe were stiff and still except for one tiny jerk in his taut jaw. “That was my plan.”

  She pursed her lips, not quite sure if she was about to laugh. “Can you just scheme to fall in love?”

  “My strategy was for you to fall in love with me,” he corrected, as if strategizing was so much better than scheming. “Then I intended to reintegrate some of your nanites into me and copy the discrepancy in the linkage so I would feel the same.”

  “As if love is a contagious infection.”

  “M
ore like a vaccine against the keyholder code. Using a dead virus, since of course a shroud can’t truly feel anything.” His darkened gaze slid away from her.

  A kiss. A feeling. A bond. She curled her hand back to her throat. “So you hijack the link that would’ve made you vulnerable to the controlling code, then you appear before the empress, let her activate your complete programming, then laugh in her face as you fly off into the sunset alone.”

  “Everything except the laughing part.”

  She shook her head. “And here I thought I was using you.”

  He swiveled back to face her. “We both want to be free of your empress. Show me how to lock in this bond between us and I’ll find a way to let us walk away from the pasts that weren’t our fault so we can choose our own futures.” Again, she caught a glimmer of silver in his eyes.

  Maybe he hadn’t been lying before about his nanites being repressed, but he was recovering. He still needed her though—or not her, exactly, just what he’d inadvertently made her—to escort him in this undertaking.

  “Me a whore, you a liar.” She laughed, a sharp sound that dredged up the bite of the hasty pixberry wine. “How are we supposed to fall in love?”

  “Who else would we fall in love with?” His fine lips curled just the faintest bit as he looked down at her.

  And while she might not know everything about piloting a spaceship, she understood that, in the vastness of space, even the slightest wayward arc at the beginning could change the final destination irrevocably.

  In the end, she wasn’t sure who moved first. The gravity was so light, maybe neither of them really moved, and it was just the revolution of the moon, so quick, that spun them together.

  This time, he was the one with his back against the bulkhead. The emergency lighting bleached the Earther-visible spectrum to bland gray, but to her altered eyes, his aura sparked silver. The metallic silhouette seemed to raise every tiny hair on her skin and every invisible nerve in her body with electric sensation.

  And when he touched her…