Resurrection Heart: Robotics Faction - Cyborg Mercenaries

by Clark, Wendy Lynn

  She dragged him against her open-mouthed kiss.

  He stilled as though caught in shock.

  Her tongue found his and she claimed him, all of his unknowable territory, for herself alone.

  Several shocks jerked through him, and then he hauled her against him. A warm hum of delicious desire thrummed through her. He crushed her to his chest. And both of them went up in flames.

  She straddled his legs, pressing her aching feminine core against his hard masculine arousal. His back splayed, muscles rippling. She dropped her mouth to his taut shoulder and tasted his wet, slick sweat with her teeth.

  He groaned, “Talia.”

  Heart-quaking heat burned in her, streaking from where her twin hardened nipples strained through the gaping suit fabric against his hard pecs, and the nub of her desire rubbed against him.

  She slipped her hands under the belt of his suit and found him.

  He stilled.

  She reached up and nibbled at his ear. “Logen.”

  He shuddered.

  She gripped the hard, thick shaft in both hands, relishing his tasty hardness and knowing exactly what to do with it. “Help me.”

  His normally steady voice caught. “What?”

  “Give me a distraction.” She caught his mouth with a breathless kiss. “I don’t care if it’s just a physiological reaction. I need all of you.”

  Chapter Ten

  He fucking lost it.

  Logen’s blood was still pounding from how close he’d come to losing Talia—again.

  He’d been right over the ridge, even pretended not to see her, because he’d loved that sneaky subversive expression on her naughty face.

  If he’d changed and thawed since they struck out into the jungle, she’d gone from an ultra-professional interacting with the world behind shrapnel-embedded glass walls to a full woman who could take care of herself and had enough left over to tease, to laugh, to swear, and to cry. Every piece of herself she revealed was another mark of her trust. He treasured it, loved it, and fantasized about it. Now, she was naughty.

  His new favorite.

  And then the next thing he knew, she was crying for help, and now they were here. Rooter neutralized by her capable hands, himself half-drowned, and her helping him come back to life in every possible way with her hot little hands wrapped around his bulging cock and her sweet mouth whispering delicious temptations in his ear.

  Fucking hell.

  “Make me forget everything but you,” she begged.

  He could do that.

  She arched her back. Her suit fell apart to show the creamy undersides of her round breasts.

  Logen pushed aside the suit and cupped her.

  She took a deep breath, swelling into his palms. Her fingers squeezed his slippery cock. “Yes.”

  Hell yes.

  He dropped his mouth to her pointed red buds, laving them with his tongue and suckling with his mouth. She gasped and moaned. Possessiveness streaked through him. This was his, and so were these. He pushed the suit from her shoulders, revealing creamy skin down to her waist, and owned every gorgeous inch of it, raising her gasps of pleasure with every kiss and caress and squeeze.

  She squeezed his iron-hard legs with her thighs.

  And then she pulled his suit down. His arousal sprang free. Her eyes glowed with hunger and she licked her lips.

  Oh, yeah.

  He cupped her through the suit. Her hunger glowed and she arched against his palm. And then, while he was working her suit down to reach her nakedness, she ran her little tongue across her hands and gripped his rock-hard cock, squeezing him with her own wetness.

  His erection pulsed with pleasure.

  Her naughty smile curled. “Feels good?”

  He grunted. “Feels great.”

  Her smile widened—the right answer, on every level—and she stroked his long shaft. Endless pleasure built up to bursting.

  He worked her suit free and gripped her mons.

  Her efforts slowed. Her eyes glazed and she closed them, breathing out.

  Soft new curls tickled his rough fingers as he found her liquid center. She gasped and canted her hips, urging him on.

  He plunged deep into her honey wetness, stroking her to humming.

  And then she gripped him with renewed energy and stroked him once, twice, three times. His body clenched. She was hot and bouncing and naked and beautiful, and powerful arousal burned in her furnace cheeks, and she clenched her thighs on him with a back-arching orgasm that squeezed his fingers deep in her and he fucking exploded, striping her and the water and the fucking world with his own incredible release.

  She clung to him for a long, long time. Just resting her head on his shoulder, her fingers loose around the still-hard root of his shaft. Interconnected. It was kind of a bad position; his wrist ached and his fingers started tingling and went numb inside her, but he didn’t even care. He would’ve held it for the rest of his fucking life if she asked.

  Finally, she pushed back with a sigh. Dark circles from their sleepless nights colored her face, but she still looked disheveled and gorgeous, like a perfect woman. “Guess it’s time for a second shower.”

  This time, they washed together.

  He was never letting her out of arm’s reach.

  They kindled a fire with a starter she found in the rooter’s guts; the owner’s markings were eaten off by acid, but the starter liquid ignited on contact with air. Then they toasted the rooter using Iren’s method and having about the same results. She had a funny look on her face when she started eating the char.

  “Not bad,” he commented. “Better than raw aquapede.”

  “It feels cannibalistic.”

  He raised a brow. The thing had tried to eat her, which proved biologists didn’t know as much as they liked to pretend.

  She sighed and handed him a woman’s chronometer.

  “It got into someone’s gear,” he guessed. “When we were here last.”

  “Mine,” she said. “And it wasn’t in my gear. It was on my wrist.”

  “This is the thing that ate you?” He kicked the half-cooked hind.

  “Probably after I was already dead.” She squinted at the meat.

  Well. He’d kill it all over again if he could.

  He bit into it more viciously than necessary. “Tastes delicious.”

  She smiled wanly. “You said we’re two days from Base Two? The creatures don’t roam far. Any chance I took the hover bubble and came here myself?”

  “Why?”

  “Could it have been because of something you said?”

  The night stilled. The fire popped and sparks floated up on heat waves into the clear night sky.

  Persistence. That was Talia. When she realized he was double-checking her spots, she triple-checked them. When he paused an operation to rescue civilians, she called in backup to get them out of harm’s way. Why did he think she was going to give up on this detail, just because he wished it never happened?

  He felt his head shaking, denying it had ever happened, even as he broke down and just told her what fucking idiocy had gone down. “We were talking about us.”

  “That night, right before I got murdered?”

  “Yeah.” He shook his head. So fucking stupid. “I thought maybe you’d want to... ah...”

  “Continue what we started here all those weeks ago?” she suggested, her gaze warming in a way that both helped and made this whole thing infinitely harder to choke out. “Because we were stationed alone together for the whole night like so?”

  “Yeah.”

  She continued to stare at him.

  “And if, you know, you wanted to make it more official and apply for joint bunks or some shit.” It came out in a rush. Whew. Fucking done.

  Her expression flattened. Just like that night.

  He waited a second.

  A very long second.

  “Wow,” she said. “I just never... wow. Huh.”

  Not, Wow, she was thrilled
this time. Not wow, we’ve been through so much and I can’t live without you, or she realized how much she really did like him, or she wanted to make it official after all.

  Just, Wow. And a slightly confused, Huh.

  He scrubbed his face, unwilling to see the same goddamned conversation play out all over again. “It was just an idea.”

  “No, I get that. I don’t really... huh.”

  Fuck.

  “Right, so, yeah. You don’t have to worry about any misunderstandings from this afternoon. We’re both isolated and under stress. It just happens, like a physiological reaction.”

  Again, silence thinned the veil between their crackling fire and the infinite universe overhead encompassing space.

  She blinked suddenly as though it all finally clicked. “I called it a physiological reaction to stress. And then I turned you down.”

  “You remember?”

  “No.”

  Right. No, she’d died only a few hours later, so of course those memories had died with her and not been part of the ones she’d saved in her last restore point.

  “I’m so sorry.” Amazingly, sympathy seemed to be the first thing she went to. “Really, Logen.”

  He couldn’t look at her.

  It wasn’t even that permanent of an arrangement. They were both still enslaved by the corporation, who could move one of them into a different unit without any care about their official bunk status. Or Talia could promote out of Hazard Zero as soon as she racked up enough honors, leaving him behind.

  Even with these easy outs, she had denied him.

  She squeezed his knee. “It’s not you. It was all me.”

  The pieces of shrapnel that had embedded in his heart after her denial wiggled free and began coursing like hot lead through his bloodstream. “You said the same thing that night too.”

  “Yeah, I probably did. But I—”

  “It’s okay,” he interrupted. “I don’t want to anymore either.”

  Her tone dropped. “You don’t?”

  He shook his head, even as his heart cracked in half and the damned stents did nothing. “It’s better not to change things from how they used to be. Safer for everybody.”

  “Right.” Her smile seemed sad. “Well, we’re not any closer to figuring out why I came out here.”

  So apparently the conversation was over.

  The shrapnel embedded into his veins, squeezing pain with every single beat of his heart. He spoke, hardly understanding what he said. “And who returned your hover bubble and restored the force shield.”

  They took turns on watch. With the fire, nothing seemed so frightening, and the clear night lasted until almost morning when clouds moved in and changed to a light drizzle.

  She poked around the gory slime that remained from the carcass and returned with an incredible find: a small piece of metal. “My badge comm. Let’s see if it saved the last recordings.”

  He packaged up the overnight-smoked rooter meat while she scraped off the accumulated chemical scaling and cleaned the controls. By the time the drizzle had increased to a fire-dousing spatter, she had it operating.

  “There is something.” She stood in the pouring wetness, held up the badge, and pressed play.

  “...ssss...about our Logen. It’s...sss...important. Meet...sss...waterfall? Sss...”

  A cold, hard ball formed in his stomach.

  “I don’t recognize the voice,” Talia was saying, as she pocketed the badge comm for later. “It could be male or female. The player is too warped. Can you tell who it is?”

  He shook his head slowly. “Not at that level of distortion.”

  But the truth was clear.

  It wasn’t a biologist they’d just met. It wasn’t someone in Bad Company who barely cared. None of them would dare call him “our Logen.”

  The person who lured her out and murdered her was someone on their own fucking team.

  Lightning cracked across the blackening morning sky and storm winds shook the trees. He finished packing up in the drenching downpour. A second later, thunder boomed.

  Not only thunder.

  Dark clouds coated the sky, and no lights marked the ship. But they both heard it: Low engines, sweeping over their region.

  They both raced into the furious waving trees. Before the storm, last night had been so clear. Clear enough, perhaps, for a satellite image of their fire.

  “I don’t know who to hope is up there,” she said, soft.

  He touched her, shoulder to her back. She glanced up at him, just a soaked profile in the stormy darkness.

  The noise faded.

  Then it returned.

  Along with turret gunfire. The lagoon bubbled with ammo and chewed up the ground, erupting dirt in the iconic pattern of an atmosphere-grade shuttle’s defensive cannons.

  They raced into the jungle, Logen half-carrying her and their supplies, slipping and sliding into a world on fire with lightning and booming with distant weapons fire. Trees swung crazily overhead, dislodging entire ecosystems of branches and collapsing like ancient ruins.

  They ran until they had no breath and the firefight disappeared into the distance.

  “What the hell?” Logen demanded, angry enough to shout at the storming sky. “Who’s doing this? Why?”

  “The Robotics Faction,” Talia gasped.

  “What are they still doing here? Why don’t they think we’re dead?”

  “Maybe we tripped something. Or it might not be about us. They could be using this planet as a base to take over the solar system.”

  “Crazy bastards.”

  “Now they know we’re alive, they also have to know we’re heading to Base Two. We’re being driven into a trap.”

  He turned grim in the stormy darkness. “Then we’ll have to spring it so hard it slams back in their cold metal faces.”

  Chapter Eleven

  As the storm grew in intensity, they trekked into a new nightmare.

  Trees swayed and fell all around them, crashing into the ground and exploding like a thousand cliff-breakers.

  They fumbled through mudslides turned to cliffs, trickles turned to rivers, and the fear that any downed tree that didn’t flatten them would expose their location to the mysterious ship patrolling overhead.

  With her exoskeleton destroyed by the rooter’s gut acid, she had no choice but to fumble on, slowing Logen down, while the storm engulfed them in noise and fury.

  The ground sprouted rivers and they slid down muck slicks into swampy pits teeming with dinozoids in a frenzy feeding on the different insects and land creatures thrown into their maw by the storm.

  One descended on her with a growl. Furiously snapping teeth closed on her face.

  Logen shoved the dinozoid back, into the muck. It came at him again. He unsheathed his knife and buried the blade in its thick, black hide.

  The creature turned away, waddling for easier prey. It took Logen’s knife with it.

  He swore as it disappeared into the frenzy.

  She struggled out of the chest-high mud. “Logen!”

  He gave up his pursuit and pulled her out.

  They spent a wet, cold night in a hollow that seemed safe from slides. In the morning, the crack of ship-to-ship turret fire awakened them.

  Someone was coming in fast and low. It flashed overhead, shaking the still-dripping trees.

  And something came after it, gunning with the regular kapow-pow-pow of a shuttle-mounted deterrent. It flashed overhead too.

  In the distance, something fell from the sky, gray and screaming, a payload with a specific target.

  It headed for Base Two.

  But it didn’t explode on landing.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  He grunted.

  Yeah. It didn’t really matter. “Let’s keep an eye out.”

  They continued on.

  Base Two was a mirror of Base One in all the important ways but one. The force shield had been packed away weeks ago, just a day after her and
Logen’s ill-fated night out.

  Midmorning, Talia stumbled over a particularly large rock and smacked into Logen.

  He steadied her. “Okay?”

  “I ran into this.” She kicked the rock. It was embedded deep in the mud, under vines blooming with beautiful starry flowers.

  He turned away.

  The flowers obscured something printed on the rock.

  It was the biologists’ expedition logo.

  “Um, Logen?”

  He was already following the rock into the dense foliage, moving thorny palms and shivering vines out of the way to uncover a man-made structure. The wall of the armory emerged from the gloom, glistening with tiny moss, waving worms, and lichens.

  “Welcome to Base Two,” he said grimly.

  “Holy shit,” she breathed. “How long was I out again?”

  Foliage grew up and over the lips of the main tents; tendrils reached in windows, and one tree burst Medical’s steel-reinforced roof as it reached for the tiny bit of sky in the otherwise impenetrable canopy.

  The jungle was visibly swallowing the base.

  “I thought we still had supplies here,” she said, as they slipped and slid over the jungle floor into what had so recently been a human settlement.

  “Yeah,” Logen murmured. “We did.”

  “They’ll be eaten by the time the clean-up crew gets here.”

  They straddled a log and forded a stream—half water, half insects—and reached the center of the base.

  In the center was a new crater. It was from the payload someone friendly had dropped a few hours earlier while taking turret fire from their enemies.

  Upside down in the crater rested their Mobile Command Unit, also known as their tractor.

  Six wheels were treaded with rock-breaking metal-tipped rubber. Grooves were optimized for running across water, mud, lava, and plasma. Fifteen moveable segments guaranteed it would never high center or low scoop itself, and thick radiation-proofed, electrically neutral, reinforced walls embedded with solar flare resistant, expedition-grade polarizing glass protected the inhabitants from extreme temperatures and external danger.

  The tractor had its own comm system. It broadcasted farther than the nearest star, as soon as it had a clear line of sight.