The thought that she’d have to soon hurt Hoss killed her heart. If she had one of those. It was probably missing. She was definitely a bitch. She should never have let this happen.
As if she had a choice.
The cybermonks had started this... The assholes.
“Hey, Baz.” Hoss jerked his head upward. “Ember mentioned you said there might be special things you could do. Cock things. Is it true?”
Had she told him that?
Baz nodded, opened his hands, shrugged. As if to say it was nothing.
“Want to show me?”
Ember rolled her eyes.
Baz checked she wasn’t currently poking him with the knife, then stood and partly collapsed his armored pants. Then he sat again. Without being too obvious, she watched. This was going to be good. A man showing off his fancy cock. As if that meant anything to her. His cock was nowhere near as big or interesting when he wasn’t using it on her.
It turned bright pink and swelled, rapidly looking like a balloon from a party. That made her snort. Hoss leaned backward and said whoahhh.
The color faded, went to black with steel rivets and bands.
Her blush happened unexpectedly. She remembered seeing that.
Then spikes popped out. Ohhh myy. Those she remembered too, inside her. She’d never actually seen them. They looked deadly in a badass yet nice way. They’d exploded like an orgasm bomb inside her. Maybe she shouldn’t inform them of this. Giving Hoss ideas would be incredibly bad.
He was already looking at her and waggling that monobrow. Dayum.
“No. No, no. no. Once was enough.”
Baz’s cock began to do something that had her mouth staying open. It split in half then each part, one cock above the other, erected again to close to his full girth. Maybe the length was less but he had a double cock...
“Ohhh, now.” Hoss chortled, rocking back and forth. “This!” He pointed. “This I need to see used. One in Ember’s cunt, the other in her ass.”
Crap. If she said anything he’d go on and on.
Even Baz sniggered.
“Shush you two. I have work to do. No, that is not going in me.”
“Later we might have some other work for you.” Again with the brow waggle and Hoss leaned in.
“No, butt anything,” she added firmly, waving the data knife. “Shhh.”
Though he guffawed a few times, Baz shifted then sat very still, as he always did when she needed him to.
The wind moaned past their campsite, rustling the knee-high grasses and somehow triggering more loneliness...because, because if the males weren’t here, she’d be alone facing this.
It didn’t make logical sense for that to bother her. In frustration, she drove deeper with the knife than she intended this round, and found what she’d been seeking for days – the data knot that tied his lack of speech into his new abilities.
Unlock it and she’d surely get him talking again. Again, he’d suffer – this time some strength reduction, but the added extra was not worth losing his humanity over. Speech was a key to what made men and women, all intelligent humanoids, different from lower animals.
Ember opened her mouth to say this, then saw what else was hiding this deep in his cybersystems – the Warranty File.
Fuck them. What scrolled down her data specs was so typical. They’d written in a compulsion to lust after her, same as they’d compelled her somehow. So...it wasn’t real then? If she undid this and that, he’d break warranty according to their inane terms. They were dead though, weren’t they, the monks? Surely they must be. Break warranty and he’d fall out of lust with her. Lust, not love, of course.
She sat back on her heels, sneering at her own naivety.
Then she snapped the links, deleted the warranty compulsion, and set him free without asking. He’d want this.
And then...then she watched his face change as he realized what had happened.
A small amazement spread to his eyes. The best she could compare it to would be watching a flower blossom. Baz opened his mouth, cleared his throat, then worked his jaw. Hoss fell silent; he knew she’d achieved something.
Would he be able to talk? She wanted to poke him but was afraid she’d done something wrong after all. Baz lowered his head.
“Hello?” A smile sneaked onto his lips. Quietly he added, “I can talk? I can. Gods. Ember, you did it!”
She’d forgotten the timbre of his voice, how deep it was – how it might warm her merely listening to him say a few syllables. She’d known this man, this cyborg, but not as she did now. On his ship they’d been strangers really. He, a somewhat angry and distant person. She, preoccupied with her own problems.
“You’ve done it. Come here.” Then he leaned down, took her by the shoulders, and...
He kissed her. So gently, like the murmur of the sea, of a tide washing through her, reaching into her fingers her toes, making her so aware of this man who held her. She’d seen his rough side these past days, but this, this was truly him.
He pulled away and looked into her eyes. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” She smiled.
Ember felt shy, of all things. As a mute, Baz had lacked a certain humanity? She thought that was it. Now she saw intelligence, and felt more naked than she had been with him before.
“I couldn’t think properly without knowing words. Now I can and I’m...” He shook his head, swallowing. “I’m so grateful to you. Really.”
Were those tears shining in his eyes? The moonlight was strong tonight.
“I’m just glad it worked. You won’t be as strong or fast from now on. Those were linked.”
“Doesn’t matter.” He squeezed her shoulders.
“We will just be more careful from now on,” Hoss said quietly.
“Mmm.” She nodded, a little entranced by Baz’s forthright admiration. So happy, though. She’d done something good for someone she adored.
“I couldn’t think well without words but I felt emotions clearer than I normally do. I don’t know when it happened, but...” He kissed her forehead. “I think, I’m in love with you. How could I not be?”
“Oh.” Fuck.
It was just a side effect or something, she almost blurted. But she didn’t.
He released her then, as if to give her time to sort out her feelings. And gods, she needed that time.
Love was not possible.
Desperately, she looked to Hoss and found him staring back. He knew Baz had said something significant.
After that, they let her be and talked a little more. Baz was testing out his speech, she guessed, as well as the two of them running through the past few days of their history, and what lay before them.
Neither of them seemed likely to pull her aside and pin her down, make her say what they wanted her to.
Love.
She squashed her lips together. She figured Hoss had notions like that too.
Later she lay between them, staring up at the sky and trying not to sob. What was she going to do now?
Ig arrived – popping out of the air, flapping a few times, and descending onto her chest. He wove a few circles on her breasts, tromping about to get comfy. She smiled through her watery eyes. Least she had him.
As his eyes lowered sleepily, she tickled the side of his little jaw, feeling the bump of his scales under her finger.
Hoss cleared his throat. “Tomorrow, I expect you to tell us...”
Oh crap. She cringed, anticipating the next words.
“What the fuck that creature is.”
Ig? Relief flooded her. “You can see Ig?”
“I can. Baz says he has too. For a few days.”
She’d missed that part of their conversation.
The stars above twinkled, clean and bright. She’d never come across anyone else who could see Ig. That it was these two...her first lovers in a way, if you excluded a few brief assignations, it was telling, discomforting, as if Fate was trying to fucking force her hand.
/> “I’ve had him since I was little. Always, really. I guess he’s a pet of sorts. He does something odd, travels through hyperspace maybe, or other dimensions.”
“Uh-huh.”
Baz rolled over and stared at her and Ig. “That’s not possible.”
Neither was being invisible. She sighed. “I’m no physicist. I don’t know what he does, but he does it. I’m sleeping now. Shhh.”
She shut her eyes.
In that twilight time of almost sleep a notion came to her, and she knew it had to be done. The cybermonks had been fucking with her life, their lives, for long enough. She was going to read the DSU tomorrow. If it had something on it that they wanted, she needed to find out what it was, because, there was a chance the monks had survived.
It was akin to arming herself. Knowledge could be deadly.
During the next few days the men were going to ask her about their future. Her stomach wormed about, hurting. Maybe she should just kill herself.
This scared her more than the Xatar.
Why?
Because she had her future glued to being with CESS. That was normal. Easy.
Them? If she was with Hoss and Baz, she’d be happy until something went wrong. She’d lose her job with CESS; so would Hoss. It’d be a sort of doom waiting to fall on them. Even if Baz got his ship back, where would that go?
Roaming between star systems, picking up odd jobs? Being the systems tech for a cyborg captain who did what? She wasn’t entirely sure what he did.
Why not? It wouldn’t pay well, would it, but would that matter? She could help him organize.
Did she really care more about money, career, stability, than being happy and with these two amazing guys?
Fuck, no? Maybe? It was all whirling about. She should think some more.
Reading the DSU was going to violate her work agreement anyway.
It was a sign.
Or was it?
Sleep on it. Think. Hurrying this was bad.
Sleep...
Ig sneaked his head under her hand, and she smiled. She’d always have him as a friend.
Chapter 25
Hoss ambled along beside him. They had their weapons in hand – Hoss had slung the sledge gun onto his shoulder. Companionship. Baz thought about how that had come about. One day he was fine and normal, his usual self, itching to get stuff done but not really happy with most of it. Jealous too, of Hoss. Then he’d lost his speech, turned into a cyborg with too much muscle, a lot of dick, not a whole lot of reasoning power.
He’d been dazed. Muffled from reality. When you had no words to describe things, the world simplified. For days emotions had been the basis of who he was; they’d prompted his actions. He’d known precisely what he wanted, what turned him happy or sad or angry. He’d missed words but without them he’d sorted himself out.
He wouldn’t say he’d turned from mud into a diamond, but before this he’d been a thousand different desires going in a hundred different directions. Now, he was distilled. Purposeful. Maybe he was a better man. He hoped so.
He had less muscle now too than when he’d gone full cyborg, but he could stand straighter and hopefully he’d grown more brain. Seemed like it. Ember had helped him be reborn.
He knew what he felt for her was real.
Ember was walking ahead of him and Hoss. Close enough to be safe if anything attacked. Far enough away that he felt he could talk without her overhearing.
The little dragon critter, Ig, was sticking around today and was flying here and there. Sometimes it sat on her shoulder. It was transparent but with enough red and black to make it visible. A creature as unique as she was...
Time to say it. “I told her I love her.”
“You too, huh?”
“Yeah.”
They ambled on some more. This side of Verd, the plain was pretty dead flat. No trees. The wreckage of various downed craft kept things interesting. Smoke trails wiggled upward from a few they passed. No one lived. The non-Xatar ones were unmanned.
“Who do you think won, Hoss?”
“Don’t know. Still no signs of anything alive.”
A mech in the distance, a CM brand one, was all they’d come across.
He hefted the arc rifle, let it ride beside his neck. “Talking again is a bit of a high.”
“Really?” Hoss grinned. “Talk my ear off then. So, what are we doing with her? I’ve thought of talking but it didn’t go so well last I tried getting close, in Verd.”
“Things are deeper now, surely, between us all? Why’s she backing off?”
Hoss huffed out a pained breath. “I think she thinks we’ll both be minus jobs with CESS. And...” He looked across at Baz. “Being with an orc and a cyborg will make us social outcasts.”
True. It would. But not to his crew or anyone who mattered.
“I want to talk to her.” He smiled. “We can’t just fuck her and get her to say yes afterward? If we do it right?”
“Hehe.” Hoss laughed softly. “I thought of that. No. Not fair. Not really a binding contract for something that’s the rest of my life and hers.”
“That serious?”
“Of course. I mate for life, half-orc or not. Not you?” His eyebrow cocked. “I want you in this but not if you can’t commit.”
“No...no.” He eyed Ember’s swaying hips, the skirt of her dress twitching to and fro, and he sighed. “No. I’d be in this for life too.”
Who wouldn’t be? With her. His cock agreed, pumping with blood, or whatever the monks had arranged to supply it. Wasn’t just physical though. He loved her, who she was.
“You know, at first I thought all the variety they gave my cock was stupid, but now... Fuck.” He reached into the armor, between its waist and skin, and adjusted himself.
“Now you want to try it on her. Yeahhhh. I want to watch. We’ll get her to talk in Verd. I promise. I’ll get my courage up. I know we can all get this to work. We can buy another ship if we have to. We’d have the funds for something like the Leaf, though we’d have to borrow some.”
The Leaf was still up there. He felt it. The ship was as related to him as his grandma by now. In his blood. He’d get her back.
Baz chuckled. Kinda funny that Hoss needed courage to talk to Ember, though he understood completely.
“I’ll be your wing man, Hoss. We’ll bring her down in flames of lust.”
“Oh!” Hoss plonked his hand on his chest and made an astounded face. “You did save up some good words, Mister Poet.”
He mock-bowed to Baz then they continued on, companionable again, sharing space in that way men did when they knew each other well, trusted each other.
Why had he ever thought being a loner could be right for him? This filled his heart. Hoss and Ember and him. They had to get her to say yes.
Chapter 26
Craters pocked the landscape. Smoke haze floated, obscured the horizon. Felled buildings had become irregular hot mounds where girders and melted glassomer were often all that was recognizable. Verd was flattened. Most of the bodies of humanoids were charred, contorted things.
She’d made herself not look. There were too many to bury.
She had the DSU in front of her on the black Xatar pack, to keep it clean. Dirt wouldn’t get into this sophisticated storage unit but it didn’t hurt to be careful. She adjusted her data specs on her face then raised the knife.
Ready, steady, let’s do this and fuck up my employment opportunity. My career, my pristine record – splat.
On the right planet, CESS might even get her jailed on criminal charges for misuse of company data. She had to know why this thing was so important. If the cybermonks lived, she needed this to throw some screws into their machinery.
She switched on the knife and applied knife tip to the DSU. The violently purple blade flickered and twisted.
Carefully, she peeled back the first layer of defense and encryption. Violet specks danced over her hand as she adjusted the knife.
If she was
going to be with Hoss and Baz, it didn’t matter about career. Baz had detected a faint signal from the Leaf and, logically, that was where she and Hoss would end up working. Discussing this would happen after she said yes to them.
She was saying yes, wasn’t she?
Frowning, Ember peeled back the second layer of defense.
The guys were being patient with her. They all knew what was at stake.
Same as she did with a work contract she’d set herself a deadline, a goal. The DSU was it. After this she considered herself free to choose to be...
She swallowed, staring up at the sky. A few breaths calmed her. Okay...to be theirs and she guessed that’d make them hers. Though somehow she liked the first way of thinking this.
Theirs. Mmm.
She peeled back three more layers and there it was – raw data. This wasn’t just files, it was a clone of the AI in charge of CESS on the other planet.
Wait. No.
Unholy whatevers, that was a no. It was more.
Her head swam with dizziness as she contemplated what she had here.
It was not a clone. It was the AI in charge of the entire CESS network. Everything. Knowledge back a fuck-ton of years. She flipped through the decades and by no coincidence at all, found the year of her approximate birth.
She always looked at that. She never found anything of consequence.
Her stomach turned queasy.
But this time she had.
That year CESS had been involved in neutralizing several planets, same as it had the year before, and before that. She’d been working for a company that advocated genocide. Correction, planetocide.
“Fuck,” she breathed, thinking fast. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
How could she tell if one of those was her home planet? Her own name came up a fat negative, but she didn’t know her other names or her parents.
Her carer. She knew her full name though it’d never been a hit on any databases. Hands shaking on her knees, she closed her eyes and mentally input the name.
Ding. The info scrolling down her retina said the woman’s home planet was Venet and that planet had been obliterated in its entirety by a special CESS task force, turned into asteroids and cosmic dust in the year Ember thought she’d been born.
Steel (Dark Monster Fantasy Book 2) Page 14