by Elsa Jade
“Nothing here except what we want.”
“No consortium,” she confirmed. “No empress. No matrix. Just us.”
“Alone in all the universe, but we have this.”
When his head tilted another degree, his lips brushed hers across an atomic distance of electrons with the molecular weight of promise, and she let out the breath she’d been holding.
At the soft sound of her desire, he anchored one hand at her nape, and the wordless demand in his grip sent an electric charge down her spine. He reeled her in, closer and closer, his mouth slanting hard across hers, as if he didn’t care about the rules of physics and would merge them into one.
He let out his own breath in a growl of hunger, sweetened with cocoa and incandescent with his craving. She thrust her fingers into the locks of his hair, bringing their bodies flush. Maybe she couldn’t make them one, but she could make sure he didn’t escape.
No, this wasn’t about forever, just for tonight. Not that day or night mattered in space…
And then she wasn’t thinking at all as his clever fingers stripped her clothes and all her nerves lit up in fireworks. Once he had her naked, he mostly let her lead, exploring all the secret ways her body could feel pleasure that she’d never known, vistas and depths she never expected within her. And just when she thought she’d felt every sensation, indulged every wish, he unveiled another dimension, beyond her costuming, deeper than skin, past all her defenses. She shivered with the passion he aroused in her, wracked with the equally devastatingly knowledge that it couldn’t last.
If they lost to the consortium, they’d be dead. If they won… They’d be free, untouchable, and this would be over.
Sinking her fingers into the pad of muscle across his shoulders, down his flanks, over his backside, she held him tighter, as if she could leave a mark that nanites would never wipe away. And as she took him into her body, she reveled in the intimate possession. Once she was a shroud too, she’d never again know the pain and fear of someone else holding the keys to her body, heart, and soul.
But this one time, she’d love it.
Bound by nanites and fate, they climaxed together in a primal rush, all gasping breath and raw flesh.
And even after they collapsed to the cushions, they remained tangled together.
“I think I left my body,” he murmured.
She rubbed her cheek on his shoulder. “I set the gravity light. We probably floated a little.”
“Maybe.” His arm tightened around her, one hand riding low on her hip. “But I better hold on, just in case.”
She hadn’t actually set the gravity that low, but she found herself clinging to his chest anyway. She’d never held onto any of the cowboys at the saloon, and even her relationships on the royal barge had all been transactional. Back then, she’d told herself she did only what she needed to stay alive. But now when she was the closest she’d ever been to death, somehow she didn’t want this moment to be about saving her life. She wanted it to just…be.
And that was a more dangerous desire than sleeping with a shroud.
“We should probably get back to our calculations.” Even as she said it, she couldn’t force her fingers to release her grip on his biceps.
“I left the ship’s AI digging through the metadata and all the information I have. The emperor’s old messages with the consortium. Communications from the scavengers who attacked my matrix. Everything I originally salvaged from the transport crash.” His thumb thumped lightly against her hip bone with each source he mentioned. “This is only a pleasure cruiser, but it’s still the most sophisticated neural net that I’ve had access to since I regained consciousness.” His hand lifted to cup the back of her skull for a moment then combed gently downward through the tangled strands of her hair. “If we can’t extrapolate the location from those records, we’ll have to find another way. It might take some time.” With a tug, he curled her into his body. “Would that be so bad?”
Her heart skipped over a few beats, rattled by something he didn’t say. Would it be so bad? The long reach of his arms around her suddenly felt like less of a shield, more of a trap. They’d committed to this night, this fight, but did she dare ask for more? How many promises made in the dark—“I’ll pay you next week, I swear…” “Goodnight, sweet little Nell, I’ll see you in the morning”—were broken in the light?
He’d accused her once of being greedy. It wasn’t true. All she’d ever wanted was to see a little bit of the world, to see if she could understand why her mother left without a word, seemingly without a care. But the world she’d seen—the universe she’d found—hadn’t answered her question. All it had taught her was that no one cared, and that she had best harden herself too if she wanted to survive.
A shroud’s lethal programming would’ve delivered that. So how strange that it was a heartless cyborg who cared enough to free his brethren from their programmed chains.
She wanted him to succeed—no, she needed it—so that she could finally believe at least one person in the universe cared. Even if that person was a killer robot.
She hauled herself up on his chest high enough to kiss him one last time.
“Not sure how much time we’d have,” she said, gazing down at him. “There’s not enough pie in the dispenser to make this our home.”
The silver light was gone from his eyes, and in the shadows the usually sparkling green was darkened to gray. A little chill traced down her bare skin. Maybe she’d turned down life support too much…
“Not enough pie,” he repeated. “True.” Half rolling to the side, he settled her on the cushions and reached for her discarded chemise. He tucked the skirt around her, and the thin, tough cloth warmed to her body.
But then he stood up and the chill returned. She struggled upright against the truss of her own dress. “Where are you going?”
“Nowhere. We’re aimless in space, remember?” He angled away from her, toward the comm panel in the middle of the seating pit. “Unless…”
Those long, clever fingers—so recently playing across her skin—tapped out a series of commands, and she watched until her patience ran out, which admittedly wasn’t long. “Unless what?”
“Home,” he muttered.
She stiffened. “The barge? Earth? We can’t go back now.”
“My home,” he corrected.
Frowning, she grabbed her chemise and pulled it over her head. “Yeah. You already told me the AI is hunting through the records you gave it for the consortium site.”
“Home isn’t in the records. It’s in me.” He extracted a thin data cable from the comm panel and jacked it into the back of his hand.
She restrained a wince. Maybe she wasn’t cut out to be a shroud after all…
“When a matrix is keyed, all ownership information is assigned to the purchaser,” he started.
She straightened. “And since your matrix crashed before the emperor took control, you were never keyed. So the ownership metadata will lead back—”
“To the consortium.” He nodded curtly. “The engineers have encrypted all my programming for security. But everyone always leaves a way out…and a way back. With any luck, when I was rebooted back to factory settings after the first mission failure in preparation for reassignment, my manufacturing metadata would’ve been restored.”
“A homing beacon,” she murmured. “Buried, but still there.”
He nodded once curtly. “A homing beacon isn’t something the consortium has had to deal with before, considering shrouds are intended to serve their keyholders until they die.”
Watching him pump his fist, as if he could force the data through the jack more quickly, she bit her lip. What if those old codes weren’t in him? What if he wasn’t actually a shroud but just a cheap knockoff without any hope of regaining his legacy programming? What if he and his brothers were actually safe, and what if she’d have to learn to live with nothing more than a few nanites?
Would that be so bad?
M
aybe they didn’t need to be all-powerful. Maybe he had no obligation to free all the shrouds. Maybe this stolen cruiser with its insufficiency of pie was indeed enough.
A sharp rush of fear pierced her like the jack in the back of his hand, injecting her with doubt. Why did she think she deserved more?
She sucked in a breath, ready to tell him to stop, to forget it all, when the projector in the comm unit lit with the translucent image of a 3D map. It wasn’t any galaxy she knew and the map zoomed in too quickly for her to read the designation and coordinates, but presumably Troy was capturing all of it.
“Home sweet nowhere,” he whispered.
It really was nowhere. The map illuminated a seemingly empty sector, far from the transit lanes of the intergalactic community, no inhabited planets, not even suns.
Even on the darkest nights after her mother left or when she briefly roused from an opium-soaked sleep, she’d looked up to see the big sky and the infinite stars. If the Theta she called Troy had ever been conscious with a moment of freedom as a developing shroud, he would’ve looked up and seen…nothing, a void without light.
She bit the inside of her lip hard enough to taste blood. If she spit, it would be red, the silvery protection of her nanites too faint for the naked eye.
“Maybe the consortium base isn’t there anymore,” she said. “It’s been a long time. And there’s not even anything to orbit. If anything was out there in the middle of nowhere, it was likely a space station or retrofitted asteroid, roving like the royal barge.”
He stared at the map generated from the info in his blood. “Maybe so. But it’s all we have.”
As he yanked the jack from his skin, a single dot of metallic gray welled in the tiny wound.
She stared at the evidence, impossible to ignore, of what he was. A shroud, designed and delivered to fight. And in the absence of a mission, having been abandoned by those who made him, he was returning with revenge in his heart.
He hunched over the comm, with the same predatory focus he’d given to her pleasure so recently. He tapped out a few more commands. “Between the old location, previous messages, and my homing beacon…” Another glowing dot appeared on the map, and he breathed out a low curse. “This is the originating source for the recent batch of messages matching most of the metadata in my compiled records being exchanged with the system”—he gestured to the side panel on the board that scrolled with more data—“currently embroiled in a nasty civil war.”
“Someone looking for the universe’s most lethal fighters.” She swallowed hard. Somewhere—maybe in that glowing X-marks-the-spot on the map—shroud blanks were being programmed to fight, kill, and die on command. Most wouldn’t be as lucky as Troy’s matrix, to be lost and salvaged or they wouldn’t have that chance unless she and Troy could stop the consortium.
She’d just wanted a shroud’s power. In some ways, the lives of a farm girl and a saloon girl had been as cruelly limited as that of a shroud. She’d only wanted the power of the shroud programming, but now she knew she couldn’t take that without freeing the others. Including Troy. Whatever was between them would be lost when they both had their freedom. But maybe finally she could feel, by watching Troy, an echo of the trapped desperation that must’ve driven her mother. Trapped without a choice in a life that had given her nothing of her own, that woman had jettisoned everything and fled at the first chance. It might be another few centuries before Nell could forgive her, but at least she could give someone else the chance at a choice outside their programmed fate.
She leaned forward over another section of the comm board. She might not have Troy’s or the AI’s hacking and tracking skills, but she hadn’t been the most beloved toy in the empress’s collection for nothing. “I have the empress’s private comm codes,” she told him. “We can let the consortium know that the Tartaulan royal family is ready to pay up for a real matrix.”
He frowned. “The consortium already knows Tartaulan doesn’t have the credits for a matrix. Why would they be willing to deal?”
“Because we have a wild card.” She stared at him. “You.”
When he just stared at her, his gray eyes narrowed, she sat back. The single point on the map glowed between them. “If I contact them as the empress of Tartaula, with the only known feral shroud in existence, and ask them to upgrade you for a small additional fee, they won’t be able to resist.”
After a long moment, he nodded. “Thetas are known to be irresistibly charming.”
A tug yanked at her heart, halfway between a laugh and a sob. That explained everything, didn’t it? Everything about him was irresistible to her. The nanites were just an excuse.
No wonder she’d fallen in love with him.
“Such a message would catch their attention at least,” he went on, his tone thoughtful. “If they respond at all, that would give us another data point for finding them, no matter what they say.” He gave her a look she wasn’t quite sure how to interpret. “You’re ready to impersonate an empress?”
She lifted her chin. “I’ve lied to better people than the consortium,” she said tartly. “I just need to redo my hair.”
“Let’s send a query, then I’ll help you.”
After they sent off the message to the consortium via the channel he’d extrapolated and tagged with her stolen code from the empress, he sat behind her on the sunken cushions and worked the tangles of her streaked hair into elaborate braids and coils.
“You’re good at this,” she said. “Is there anything you can’t do?”
His busy fingers stilled for a heartbeat, then resumed the plaiting. “Stay,” he murmured.
Her blood raced to the tips of her extremities and back again. “Stay?” she repeated hesitantly.
“I can’t stay, can’t be close to anyone,” he clarified. “It’s not in the theta programming. We were meant to be outsiders. I always circled back to my brothers because my matrix held me. But once I release the cipher into the consortium mainframe, I won’t be bound to them or anyone else anymore. I’ll be truly free.”
With him sitting behind her, she couldn’t see his face, but the gentle strokes of his hands in her hair sent shivers down her spine. Whether he meant the warning deliberately or not, she got the message. Whatever happened, he wouldn’t stay with her.
She’d always known that. Being left behind was the reason she’d sought the shroud programming from the start. He was only repeating what she already knew.
Strange how that scar, no matter how thick, when bumped would always bleed again.
With the end of her braids still undone, she pulled away from him. “That’s good enough,” she said in a brusque tone. “They won’t care what an empress looks like.”
He folded his arms over his chest. “They need to believe it.”
“The Tartaulan royal family has been in exile for a very long time now, and still people revere the name. They never even look at the one who holds it.”
“The consortium is more discerning.”
She gave him a quick once-over. “Then they will be looking at you, their long-lost son, not me.”
“If I was ever theirs,” he said, turning away from her, “I am no longer. Let’s finish this.”
Chapter 13
Shrouds didn’t fear death. They couldn’t. That fear had been bred and tortured out of them. But they could still fear loss. Losing a battle—as his matrix apparently had—should have been unthinkable.
But now Troy knew losing Nell would be worse.
And it was inevitable, not a problem he could solve. Fighting the consortium would be the end of him, and his time with Nell would be over.
But if he didn’t fight to save his brothers, if he stayed on the outside as a Theta was meant to do, spying and scheming… That would be proof that he was nothing more than his parts and programming. A Theta, for all its cleverness, could never understand being with Nell.
Either way he would lose her, but if he died with his freedom—and his brothers’—at l
east his feelings for her would be forever his alone.
Through his love for Nell, he finally understood the cipher code he’d stolen from his brothers and their keyholders. It didn’t lock down the shrouds’ programming; the love cipher set them free.
Still, when the query to the consortium contact pinged a reply, his heart constricted, drawing inward and smaller as if to protect itself.
Part of him still wanted to stay on the outside, to hold himself apart. But the game was bigger than his lost matrix now.
Nell glanced at him before toggling the comm to accept the incoming call. “This is Her Most High Excellency, Lady Eletanvine the Seventh, Empress in Exile of Tartaula Secondus. Reveal yourself.”
The comm display in the center of the cruiser’s seating area flickered with an image of a monstrous humanoid. Only its head and shoulders were visible in the image, but the humps of muscle and thick, pebbled pads of armored skin bristling with spines suggested a being evolved for violence. A Bemhothian, Troy’s internal records said, but one that had been substantially modified, with glinting tech interface ports replacing half its heavy profile. One eye had been replaced with a scope, no attempt made to disguise or soften its purpose—war.
The slanting, spindled pupil of its other eye contracted. “Your Excellency,” it growled, a deep rumbled that translated instantly through their comm. “You have something we lost.”
Nell leaned toward the panel. “Most High Excellency,” she growled back.
The Bemhothian’s artificial eye flashed as it refocused. “Apologies. Her Most High Excellency.”
Nell nodded regally. “And you are?”
“Excellent in my own way.” The Bemhothian…grinned? Troy wasn’t sure what else to call that suave ripple of a lipless mouth that revealed only a glimpse of yellowed tusks. “But you can call me Commander Horvo. I was informed that you have a defunct, defective unit. We pride ourselves on our also excellent product and service, so if you would like to return the unit, we will happily issue you a credit toward the purchase of a more suitable replacement.”
Horvo smiled again, more tusk this time, and Troy contemplated how he’d fare against the Bemhothian commander.