He dropped to the ground without answering her, packed up their meager supplies, and started back toward the column of smoke that had once been the Supply Depot.
She struggled to her feet. “I thought we were going to Base Two.”
His strides took him rapidly away from her.
The exoskeleton strengthened her trembling legs, but the mud sucked her back, weakening her. “Logen!”
He saw her struggle without the hover disk. His jaw tightened. He returned to her side and offered his massive shoulder, helping her to hobble over the terrain.
“What are we doing?” she asked, over her strain.
“We’re going to hunker in close to the depot and fight.”
“We don’t have the weapons to make a stand.”
Grimness darkened his voice. “I’m not going into that jungle with you. We’ll fight here with whatever we find left.”
They reached the edge of the foliage surrounding the billowing smoke.
A hover bubble whirred off to their right.
Logen pushed them both to the ground. The hover bubble whirred nearby, then farther away, as though circling the smoldering depot building. Logen crawled forward on his belly and peered through the fronds.
“Who is it?” she whispered.
“They’re behind the smoke.”
A shockingly familiar whine sliced through the air and slammed into the smoking depot.
She clapped her hands over her ears. Logen dropped flat and did the same.
A furious explosion rocked the forest. The impact screamed over their backs, roaring. Foliage flattened on top of them, rattling and shredding. Overhead, trees shrieked and groaned and toppled.
Dirt pounded them, falling like a rain of fists on their exposed bodies. One crushing boulder bounced off her exoskeleton and dented the metal into her hip.
When she finally had the strength to look up, she saw nothing.
The supply depot had been turned into a crater.
Someone had shot the depot with a cliff-breaker missile.
Another hover bubble whirred through the smoke and set down. Red laser targets played against the smoke.
Infrared.
Logen gathered her up and raced back into the jungle. She didn’t ask him where they were going now.
They ran.
* * *
The sober afternoon passed into night.
Logen led the trek, whacking through vegetation with his knife, and Talia held onto his shoulder, struggling to move in her damaged exoskeleton. She had to rest often, and she seemed exhausted and depressed.
He knew the feeling.
“Maybe the androids think we’re dead,” she finally said, with a groan, resting on a hill beside a pit of ooze.
“Maybe so.”
“We could stop here.”
He carved the last shard off his new spear and slid his knife back into its holster. “You ready?”
She scowled.
“I could carry you.”
Now he’d pissed her off. She snarled. “You can’t carry me. You’ll have another ‘physiological reaction.’”
She seemed to really hate that term.
“I’ll work it out,” he said dryly.
“You can’t carry me and your weapon. What’s that, a prison shiv?”
He shifted his spear. “It’s not a shiv.”
“I’ve seen better spears in children’s books. It’s a shiv.”
“I was only ‘in prison’ for one day. Not exactly enough time to learn how to make a shiv.”
She blinked.
He tested the weight and balance. Hopefully it was sharp enough to drive between the segmented carapace of a growling black centipede. Several had reared up and waved menacingly along the path.
She had gone silent.
He turned to check on her. Keeping her in his peripheral, always.
She had a funny expression on her face. “You went to prison for killing your team member for one day?”
Ah. The error appeared to him. He waved it away and tapped his stents. “Long enough.”
“They must have hated the guy.”
“Daylight’s leaving. Let’s go.”
“One day in prison and you still got those?” Her scowl rose to his stents. “Can you, you know, tell anything from those?”
Old warnings fought to keep him silent. Safer not to tell anyone. Safer not to speak at all about his malfunction.
But she was glaring as if they had to be good for something.
He tilted his head one way, then the other. Risking the truth. “Magnetic north is that way.”
“You can’t pick up robot broadcasts or anything?”
“That would make it too easy.”
Her scowl turned thoughtful, then a little fearful. She looked away.
Fuck.
She’d done that a few times since he’d lost his temper in the Supply Depot. As though she knew what he’d been about to say, and his feelings frightened her.
He tapped the end of the spear against the crusty hill.
A strange scratching sounded under their feet. They both paused and listened. Seconds later, the scab shifted beneath Talia and fist-sized black centipedes erupted from the hill.
She struggled to rise. “Dammit.”
“Time to go,” he said, scooping her up.
The small centipedes reared up, emitted squeals, and hurtled black pitch as they ran. They shook and scraped off insects as they fell deeper into hell.
They descended into unmapped primordial jungle, following a deadly game trail. An odd heaviness of the air pressed down on them, and mists materialized ghosts between the thick, black trunks. They walked at the bottom of the deadly gray-green ocean.
Darkness fell like a blindfold, and they were forced to stop only a short distance from the Supply Depot.
No cave offered itself for shelter, so he tested the slippery black vines that oozed from his grip like eels and helped Talia up a rampike to a crotch, above android-level, that seemed wide enough for both of them to wedge in.
She rested the exoskeleton at the base of the tree and selected her spot.
He tugged her into his arms.
“Hey,” she protested.
He curled protectively around her like a shell, his back against the tree, her seated firmly in his lap. Nothing was touching a hair on her body without going over him first.
“This isn’t going to be comfortable,” she warned.
Fuck comfort. Nothing felt as good as her in his arms anyway.
“Do you want first watch or should I?”
“Relax.”
“Logen, one of us has to set a watch.”
“You need sleep.”
“So do you.”
“I’m not losing you again.”
Slowly, by degrees, she relaxed and nestled into his arms, where he most needed her to be. The darkness descended to absolute pitch. She sucked in a breath.
He tightened his grip. “Sleep if you can.”
New strange noises hissed and skittered overhead. Tentative feelers tugged at his exposure suit, and invisible creatures wriggled across his arms and legs and shaved head. He picked them off before they got to Talia. This would go down as his worst night in the mercenaries, hands down.
Except Talia nestled in his arms. Her hot body squeezed against his. Her ass was cupped by his lap, and if she moved at all, she was going to stroke it against his hardening cock. Her breasts rested against his taut forearm, and he palmed her waist. He could rest his chin on her head. One of her soft hands idly stroked his forearm, tracing lines on him.
It was the best night of his life, also hands down.
She added to it. “Logen, tell me a bedtime story.”
Sexy images thrummed through his head. “Like what?”
Her next words wrecked it like pouring ice water over his body.
“Like what happened that night.”
Shit. “That night?”
“When I died.”
/>
“We went to Base Two to pack up.” His voice cracked. He cleared it. “It was an ordinary assignment. Normal.”
“We didn’t talk or do anything?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary.”
She didn’t say anything for a long minute.
His heart started to return to normal pace.
Then, her voice turned to a whisper. “Logen, I’m afraid.”
Double shit. “Of me?”
She turned her head as though to look up, in the dark, to his stents. So deep in the jungle, no moon was visible; he couldn’t see anything, not even the whites of her eyes. “Should I be?”
“No.”
She turned away again. “Then no. I’m afraid of me.”
The ice melted. He squeezed her. “We’ll get your restore point remade. Don’t worry.”
“That, sure. But what I’m really afraid of is my old life. My civilian life. The feelings from back then have started leaking through.”
He knew what that was like. It had started happening almost the moment he met her.
Want. Hunger. Need.
“It’s terrifying.”
“Right?” She straightened again, accidentally grinding her sweet ass right into his quivering cock. “I was weak, frightened if someone raised their voice in a restaurant. I was irresponsible, always waiting for someone else to save me. I let a worthless guy push me around.”
His hackles started to rise.
She snorted as she settled back. “Now I spar with men twice my size. And I beat their faces in. Why should I feel anything like what I felt back then? I’m not the same person.”
“You just got resurrected,” he said, ignoring the tug of fear in his gut at how this would be her last until they re-encoded her restore point. “You get a pass.”
“Yeah.” She stroked his arm. “The other similarity to back when I was a weak, irresponsible, whiny civilian, is that I was also happy.”
He let the silence lengthen between them.
Was she saying that, despite everything, she was happy right now?
“I’m jealous of you and Daz.” She traced his wrist bone, sensuous and circular. “I left behind a baby brother. He’s over a hundred now.” Her voice saddened. “I missed his whole childhood.”
“You going to see him when you get out?”
“First thing.” She rested her head on his shoulder. “I hope he turned out okay.”
He breathed in her feminine scent. Like vanilla and whiskey, vulnerable and fiery-bright. And intoxicating.
“How about you?” she asked. “What’s the first thing you’ll do when you get out?”
“Not go home, that’s for damned sure.”
“Why not?”
“People from happy families wouldn’t understand.”
“My parents divorced the year after my brother was born,” she said simply. “When I tried to escape from Rezo, my mom wouldn’t let me stay with her because she was entertaining clients for her new business, and my dad told me if the guy was such good friends with the local authorities, I should try harder to make my own friends.”
He didn’t realize, but his hands had automatically formed fists.
“Dad regretted it, I guess, but then it was too late. My brother,” she switched back to the happiness, “was the best thing that ever happened to me. I got to be like his mom, even though I was way too young for the responsibility.”
“How old were you?”
She calculated. “Three decades? Four? Too young, that’s for sure.”
He shared her laugh. Everyone knew not to have children until they were at least two or three centuries old. No one younger than that had the experience or the patience.
“But it was great,” she said finally, laughter subsiding. “He was the light in my life. We had no one else, but we always had each other.”
“Daz is only a decade older,” he said, too easily telling her about his civilian past despite his intention never to tell anyone. “He did the same for me.”
“Your parents split?”
“It’s supposed to be illegal. Who saves up the ridiculous amount to have a kid only to break the parenting contract?”
“Mine didn’t have one,” she said.
“You have to on Saudade.”
“On Abrio, you just have to save up enough.”
“They’re supposed to stay together until the kid’s in his second decade to avoid lasting neurological damage.”
“Yeah,” she sighed and rested against him, “I probably got messed up some even after the second decade.”
“It fucking sucks. I’d never do that to my kids.”
“Of course you wouldn’t,” she said. “You’ll be a great father.”
His heart swelled. She might as well have reached right into his heart and squeezed. His chest seemed too small to contain his organs, because they were pounding to awareness of Talia.
She didn’t compliment people. She spoke the truth as she saw it.
His spotter.
“So what happened?” she asked. “In your family.”
He swallowed the lump in his throat. “You want to hear that?”
“It’s why I asked.”
He cleared his throat. “My mom left us for some gig off-planet and never came back. I heard she married someone else and had another whole family.”
“Shit,” she said.
He agreed. “She didn’t care about us. It destroyed my dad.”
His dad went to work same as always, day in and day out. But in all of Logen’s memories, he never spoke, never looked at them, never acknowledged they were even there. He unpacked his brown bag of liquor and sat on the ripped sofa and watched a holo, bottle in hand.
Daz handled their early independence just fine, but Logen tried to get his dad to look away from the holo and see him. His earliest memory was finding a sharp knife in the kitchen, deliberately cutting himself, and carrying the bloody hand to his father. His father looked through him. As if he weren’t even there.
“Daz patched up all my idiocies,” he said, skirting the biggest sacrifice Daz had made for him. “To this day, he’s always just trying to patch me up.”
“Lucky.”
“Yeah. That’s why I don’t care if you want to trade payouts. My brother’s already with me all the time.”
“You should probably check with him before giving away his freedom card.” She rested her hand on his forearm and said the words that changed everything. “But thanks, Logen. You’re a good man.”
Logen stilled.
Talia continued to tease her fingers over his knobby wrist. “Just take good care of yourself. If you die now, rescuing me, on the last mission before you pay out, I will never forgive myself.”
His voice rumbled in his chest. “I’m not good.”
“You have to get out. You actually have that chance. And you’re so competent and deserving and good—”
“I’m not good.”
“Yes, you are.”
He shook his head, laughing sardonically. “No.”
“You are.”
The dangerous rumble sounded in his chest again, and his heart swelled another size too big. “Talia, don’t.”
“You know the moment I knew that?”
He didn’t.
“On that doomed escort mission out at the limits of the Nar empire. We were supposed to be watching the president’s daughter, even though she was determined to give us the slip.”
Out on the far distant colonies, they’d traveled along some barely inhabited areas, especially driving from city to city. And dangling from one of the old bridges, she’d spotted a cart with four barely legal kids.
“I started to call it in, but you jumped out of the motorcade, forcing us to stop, and you rescued those boys. If you hadn’t, we were the only ones in the area who had the resources. They could have fallen and died.” She squeezed him. “That’s when I knew you were a hero.”
He remembered that one. He hadn’t reali
zed how in tune he was with her before he realized that he was looking in the direction that she had silently targeted.
Jumping out of the motorcade hadn’t been heroic. He didn’t even know what he was doing.
He’d just needed to stop the fear lancing her voice as she called it in.
Shortly after that, he’d stopped double-checking her targets.
“The unit leader was so pissed,” he said.
“Sirus stood up and took it.”
Yeah. He remembered that, too.
“And very good,” she said.
That again. The discomfort increased. “Stop.”
She took it as a challenge to think of more compliments. “You’re a good gunner and a good survivor and a good human being—”
He couldn’t take it anymore. He had to shut her up.
Logen put his finger under her chin, lifted, and pressed his mouth to hers.
* * *
With their kiss, fireworks exploded in the black night.
Logen’s mouth moved against Talia’s, fiery hot, drawing her desires to the surface. This time, she gave in and clung to him, murmuring her desires.
“You’re so strong,” she murmured, between kisses. “So good.”
His tongue plunged into her mouth, sweeping away her words, filling her to the brim with sudden, shocking need. She turned and embraced his broad shoulders, giving her fears and wishes to him for safekeeping. He wrapped his powerful arms around her and crushed her to his muscular chest. Desire burned into her body, flaming into her.
He ripped his mouth from hers long enough to kiss down her jawline to her neck, spreading the flames, igniting the fire. She tipped her head, opening herself to his delicious tongue. He made a noise in the back of his throat, deep and masculine.
She wrapped her hands around his neck and clung.
He tugged her suit collar open, kissing her sensitive neck. Shimmers of need streaked to her center, pounding with a growing ache. She pressed against his narrow waist. The hardening of his masculine strength against her thigh made her weak. He really did want her, undeniably, as much as she wanted him.
He grabbed the edges of her collar and pulled the suit apart.
Her breasts sprang free. She covered them, nervous and hopeful he would like feeling what he had enjoyed in the Supply Depot reflection.
He roughly yanked her to him and palmed the tingling skin. Reassuring her with his body that she was beautiful and desirable and that he was hungry for what only she could provide.
Resurrection Heart: Robotics Faction - Cyborg Mercenaries Page 11