by Elsa Jade
She sniffed. “Impossible except that when a reclamation team went looking for the signal of your nanites in the wreckage of your ship, they found me.”
He tucked his chin, his lips pursing to one side in the closest expression of surprise that she’d seen from him. “I always wondered why no one came looking for the transport,” he murmured. “I guess they did, but they found you.”
“By then, the fight against the Tartaula revolution wasn’t going well, so the search was rushed and the emperor decided to focus his resources on the battle. Once they figured out a well-used prostitute wasn’t what they wanted, they locked me in stasis.” She stiffened against the remembered confusion and burgeoning terror of her abduction. The reclamation team had not been approved for landing on a closed world and certainly had no license for the collection of sentient specimens, so they’d been uncaring of her identity and none too gentle with her sensibilities as they dragged her kicking and screaming aboard their ship.
She stared past him. “Odd how stasis freezes the body and all biological processes and yet leaves the mind and heart just barely alive. I remember…” She shook her head. “For a century they kept me in stasis.”
“A century?” He hummed under his breath. “All that time in stasis at the reduced biological expenditure rate you mentioned must’ve given my nanites a chance to adapt to you even though they weren’t coded for you specifically.”
“Pardon me if this new discovery doesn’t excite me much,” she snapped. “I had no intention of being an intergalactic traveler, and certainly not a frozen one.”
He shrugged. “As a potential technological advancement, it’s not very compelling,” he agreed. “A hundred years to organically incorporate a nanite load is inefficient. Building and programming a shroud is already prohibitively expensive.” He leaned against the bars, studying her. “Since you weren’t a fighter, why were you revived?”
“When the emperor was ousted from his homeworld during the rebellion, my stasis chamber was one of the random bits of treasure and cargo bundled onto the escaping royal barge. The emperor gifted me to his granddaughter when she was a child collecting oddities from around the universe. Sometimes, she would bring me out of stasis for pixberry tea parties.” No wonder she only wanted coffee now. “After she reached her majority and took her place as empress, though in exile, she made us dolls part of her entourage. I’ve been conscious ever since.”
When he wrapped his fingers around the plasteel bars of the hold, the cuffs clanked lightly. “With that history, I’d think you’d be accommodating of my next request.”
She only needed one guess what that request might be. “To be free?” Even cranking her jaw to one side didn’t loosen up the tight muscle there. “I can’t give you what I don’t myself have. Considering you abandoned me to Jed’s untender mercies when he discovered me unconscious and both of his safes plundered, I think you’d understand why I’m denying your request.”
He let his hands slip from the bars. “All you asked of me was the laudanum and a few diamonds.”
“I would’ve asked for more if I’d known you weren’t just a cowboy, if I’d known you could give me the stars.”
“Greedy whore,” he murmured.
She gave him a thin smile. “That accusation doesn’t carry quite the sting you’d think it would. Maybe in another hundred years or so when the calluses have worn away. But I doubt you’ll be around to insult me by then.” She tilted her head. “Still, I don’t appreciate it, such ungentlemanly behavior uncalled for.”
In one smooth gesture, she drew the blaster pistol from the holster at her side and shot him in the chest.
He went down even less gracefully this time, limbs splaying as he hit the bulkhead before crumpling to the deck. Probably she was wasting the charge of her specialized disruptor, but it had been worth it to see his green eyes widen in disbelief.
“I need a cup of coffee,” she muttered. Spinning on her heel in a swish of skirts, she left the fallen shroud behind her.
Chapter 4
Troy collapsed in what he hoped was a convincing display of blaster energy incohesion.
Actually, he was lying to himself. He knew it was convincing. Mostly because she really had caught him square.
He’d be unconscious again except after her first shot back on Earth he’d sequestered what remained of his nanite supply, drawing the microscopic robots deep into his implants. Testing them now, the slight churn in his plasteel bones reassured him that he hadn’t been totally drained by Nell’s specialized shot. Still. It hurt like hell. It shouldn’t—he was a shroud, after all, and it was just a stupid blaster shot—but all the recent outrages to his system had left him as defenseless as an unconscious Earther.
On the back of his tongue, he tasted the familiar-but-odd tang of his own nanites somehow changed from their time with her, twisted, and sent back to him in a way that left his systems confounded. He held back a sly smile. Given some time to focus, he could reverse engineer the original pattern of his nanites based on Nell’s unkind donation and create a template to strip the limiter coding that Vic had imposed on him.
As he lay there in a heap, his organic bits aching sullenly from the fall and his present disordered position, he contemplated his current situation.
All in all, he couldn’t have asked for better. Or at least he didn’t deserve it. But he’d been looking for a way to get off planet, to return to the consortium, and end it. Step one inadvertently accomplished.
As for the other steps, being returned to the matrix’s intended keyholder was suboptimal. If this empress forced him to imprint, he would no longer be able to pursue his own course. But presumably she had the activation codes that would give him full access to all of his lethal shroud programming. If he was going to make himself a weapon against the consortium instead of for it, he couldn’t ignore this opportunity to take possession of those codes.
He carried the blueprint for Vic’s so-called love cipher that would incapacitate the consortium’s lock on every shroud. But he needed to reintegrate himself with the main data gels and obtain access to all backup systems in order to be sure that the consortium couldn’t survive his return. The love cipher was self-replicating and insidious—really quite the apocalyptic weapon, if he was going to give proper respect—but if he was going to deliver it, he had to stay in Nell’s good graces and hoard his resources, bringing himself back up to fighting strength before he faced his nemesis and did away with the consortium forever.
She’d been amenable once to his bribes and seduction. Too bad he was entirely out of drugs and diamonds.
But he still had himself.
He lay there, parsing his small hoard of nanites, from Vic’s annoyingly limited ones to the peculiarly changed ones that had been in Nell and returned to him via the business end of a blaster. Really, for a killer robot, his victories against Earther females were embarrassingly nonexistent.
When the delicious aroma of freshly brewed coffee drifted through the shuttle, his stomach rumbled.
“Are you hungry?”
He stayed silent, the proof of his frailty sickening him more than his empty belly. A mighty shroud, reduced to begging for a cup of coffee.
“I know you’re awake,” she said impatiently. “I didn’t shoot you that hard.”
With a huff, he pushed himself into a sitting position, not quite ready to trust his weak knees. “You shot me twice,” he reminded her with great dignity. “Is it so surprising that my body might need an external power source to repair itself?”
“You can have the coffee grounds.”
“With my nanites depleted, I won’t be able to convert the leftovers to usable molecules.” He smirked at her. “I guess you’ll have to share your coffee.”
Without another word, she walked away from him, treating him to a view of her twitching split skirt. And the outline of her backside underneath. Which appeared to still be all her and maybe a little fuller than he remembered. Apparently she’
d been eating better since she’d been revived from stasis.
Her sad story of abduction and servitude didn’t shock him. Though he’d been a blank cyborg when the transport crashed, the fundamentals of the universe’s casual cruelties had been already etched into his base code. And his time on Earth had added a thick layer of real-world experience—like scar tissue. That Nell had been a sex toy for cowboys and then an alien child’s plaything didn’t seem so vile compared to being a heartless, mindless killer.
But telling her that probably wouldn’t win her favor.
He stayed seated when she stomped back toward his interim prison bearing two sealed beverage cubes. He’d never seen the enclosed cubes before—drinking on Earth didn’t require full containment while the vagaries of confined space travel necessitated more control over messy fluids and gases—but he recognized them from his programming.
How odd to think that she, a closed-worlder, had more conscious experience in space and with extraterrestrial things than he did.
She put one of the cubes on the ground and shoved it through the bars at him. “The shuttle doesn’t have chocolate sauce so this is the closest I can get to a mocha frappuccino.”
“We could go back to Earth for some,” he suggested, just a bit snidely. Equally odd to think that he, an alien cyborg, had more knowledge of the current Earth than she did.
“Maybe I will,” she shot back. “Later.”
He bobbled the cube in his hand a moment, then unsealed a corner and took a sip. Surreptitiously, he loosed a few of his sequestered nanites to swarm his belly. Feeding them would leave him hungry, but he needed to be able to recall their strength if necessary.
To his surprise, the coffee wasn’t bad. Not as good as his high-end automatic espresso center, though he’d never admit to having one when the rest of his unrefined matrix-kin and Nell’s contemporaries undoubtedly drank theirs brewed black through a dirty sock.
Even more surprisingly, Nell didn’t walk away again.
Good thing. Because he needed her. Not just for not-bad coffee either, but to fall in love.
He took another drink, eyeing her over the edge of the cube.
It was the only solution, really. He needed to lock down his command-structure inputs before he met the keyholding empress. If the imprinting protocol was hacked by an organic bond that didn’t include someone else’s full control over his will and body, he could pretend to imprint on the empress, obtain his activation codes, and finally go after the consortium with the unfettered might of his unchosen heritage.
The CWBOI programmers shouldn’t have been so lazy, using an innate biological mating urge as the template for the keyholder imprint directive. How convenient that his matrix-brothers had discovered that being in love hacked the directive.
Now all he had to do was fall in love with Nell Dearly.
At least she made not-bad coffee. He cleared his throat. “I must confess, I’m fascinated that you were able to find and capture me when no one else has.” There. Confession, fascination, and capturing seemed like a strong opening salvo toward love.
Instead, she glowered at him. “You think a greedy whore can’t be smart and driven enough to hunt down the bastard who infected her and left her a target for alien abduction?”
So…maybe not such a great beginning. “About that. I should probably say—”
“And another thing,” she raged on. “That infusion of nanites you gave me might’ve cured my pox, but it also left me unable to find solace in whiskey or laudanum.” She glared at him. “The only sources of pleasure in the saloon—certainly none to be had from you cowboys—and you took that away from me too.”
He winced. “Drinking and drugs are bad for you.”
“As if I didn’t know that,” she scoffed back. “Are you really sure the Theta designation is the most clever among you?”
Her anger and resentment would kill any chance for love. Would kill his chances of ending the consortium if he appeared in front of the keyholding empress with his imprint protocol open and waiting.
He rifled through all of his programming. Sabotage, manipulation, seduction. None of it seemed quite right. “I’m sorry,” he said at last. Although he wasn’t entirely sure if he was apologizing to her or to the other shrouds, current and future, who he wouldn’t be able to save if he didn’t get this right. “Not sorry for robbing James,” he clarified. “I meant to give you a little relief from your world, and instead I ended up taking you from it. That was not my plan, but as the matrix Theta, my aim should’ve been better, with no victims other than the ones I intended.”
She stared at him for such a long moment he actually felt himself becoming nervous. Had a shroud ever been made nervous by a silent glare?
Finally, she gave her head a little shake. “I think you think you’re actually being sincere.”
He jerked his head back. “I am. Probably the most sincere I’ve ever been.”
To his annoyance that made her grin. “I don’t blame you, exactly—well, I do—but you were bred and born a schemer. I know because I’m one too.” She cupped her hands around the coffee cube, almost prayerfully. “I don’t pretend that I’ll ever be more than that, but once I return you to the empress at least I’ll have a way out of her entourage. For the first time in my life, I’ll be free.”
The mist across her muddy eyes wasn’t drink or drugs or disease damage now, or even the silvery haze of the nanite cloud he’d breathed into her. She was seeing something he couldn’t share—that future she envisioned free of everyone else.
But he needed to lock her down to his own mission, else her freedom would likely mean his death.
He might not know what love was, but she was an Earther with all the emotion and passion and calamity that entailed. She wouldn’t be able to resist him. Once she fell in love with him, he could recall some of his altered nanites from her and follow their new patterning in order to fall in love with her. Just like any other code copying. Maybe not as inspired as Vic’s love cipher, but he didn’t need cosmic alignments, just results.
He needed Nell to love him, but instead he was starting at a deficit where she not only mistrusted him but actively hated him. Not that he blamed her, but it certainly made his task more challenging.
Consulting his programmed procedures for wooing a would-be enemy under wartime conditions, he mentally rifled through his options considering the limited time available to him.
Inciting lust and the accompanying lowering of inhibitions would probably be his best bet. But how could he get her to lust for him when he was quite literally at his worst? On Earth, he’d amassed a certain amount of fortune and power, but none of that was available to him now. He didn’t even have his grooming tools, not even his nanites that usually kept his body hair in check. He was a mess, and yet the fate of all his shroud brothers, known and unknown, fell to him tricking her into falling in love.
He took another sip of the coffee. “Thank you for this,” he said, hefting the cube. “It’s good. Maybe you could open your own saloon after you leave the empress’s employ.”
Nell shuddered. “Lording over other people? No. I saw enough of that under Jed. Give any being power and they will wield it against others. I don’t want it.”
“And yet you have that power over me right now,” he noted. He knew it had been a mistake to remind her when her expression hardened.
“Not for long. I’ve queried the royal barge, and when they respond with permission, we’ll rendezvous.”
A quiver of unease rattled his remaining nanites like dried coffee beans. Did he really think he could seduce a professional?
Not that he had a choice. “Nell, if I promised to not try to escape this ship without you, would you let me out of this cage?”
She snorted. “I should take the word of a spy and scoundrel? Does a cyborg have any use for honor?”
He met her gaze steadily. “I didn’t lie to you in our time before.”
“Are you saying Thetas don’t li
e?” She tilted her head in that way that he knew meant she was watching him through her cataracts.
“I can lie as well as any Earther,” he said with a grin. “But I have not lied to you. And anyway, you caught my sleight-of-hand even before you shared my nanites. I wonder if I could sneak anything past you now.”
That was true enough. He did wonder. Because if he couldn’t, then this whole ruse could very well be for nothing.
She drank from her own cube, and for a moment he thought she was wavering. But then she let out the same defeated sigh he remembered from the saloon. “It’s not you, Theta. It’s me. Even if you weren’t a known liar, thief, and killer, I wouldn’t let you go. I guess I’m just worse than a shroud.”
She drained the last of her coffee. “You should get some rest. You’ll want to be at your CWBOI best when you reunite with the empress. You want her to value you as highly as possible so you rank well in her household.”
Throttling his dismay, he gave her an acquiescing nod. “And where will a lone shroud, a century out of date, rate compared to a stolen Earther prostitute?”
Nell’s expression didn’t change. “When she was a child, she declined to heal my scars. Said they were the most interesting thing about me.”
He grimaced. “That…gives me some indication, yes.”
“I was able to pay for repairs to my eyes eventually, as much as possible while still looking interesting”—she sneered the word—“but you won’t have to worry about that. The only lost shroud ever reclaimed will be a unique addition to her menagerie, I have no doubt. Especially if you make good use of your seduction techniques.” She looked him over. “Although if you can make yourself bigger, I’d suggest that. She has a particular taste.”
Was this how the girls at the saloon had sized up their clientele? “I’ll take your insights under advisement.”