by Elsa Jade
She bit the inside of her cheek. She had wondered about him, but he was right that she’d managed to explain away in her head what she couldn’t understand. “There is no chance of that with the yurk now,” she pointed out. “If you thought you could keep hiding, forget it.”
“It wasn’t supposed to hatch. It was just going to stay in its egg forever. When we found that the stasis field was failing, I decided to kill it.”
She stiffened. “Mach.”
He let out a harsh breath. “I just couldn’t do it. It was the only thing to do—the right thing for me, the best thing for the yurk even. But I just couldn’t do it. It wasn’t our fault that we crashed here. It wasn’t our fault that we were made to be killers.”
How could she feel bad for a killer, a liar, an alien? But the despair in his tone was real. She felt it the same way she felt the emotions of animals that some people said couldn’t have feelings. “If you didn’t kill it, then you’re not a killer,” she said. “Whatever your programming was, obviously you can make other choices.”
“Only because we were never activated by our keyholder—the one who owns our matrix, our squadron. If we were ever reclaimed, I’d be forced to carry out my encoding on command.”
“Forced?” And she’d been rebellious because her family wanted her to have a rich, happy life as a doctor. She winced. No wonder he had hid the truth from her.
“My matrix was custom ordered, bought and paid for. That being never received their merchandise.” He ran his hand over his head, bristling the thick waves of his hair like an angry wolverine. “I wonder how long they looked for us. Not that anyone comes this far across your supercluster.”
“No, of course they wouldn’t.” He made it sound like Earth was the Carbon County of the universe: By one definition, the backend of nowhere, but also…a place where people/beings—like him, like her—could go to be themselves.
She didn’t know what to do next, didn’t know what to say, so she did the only thing she could. She took a step toward him. “Let me see your shoulder. I wasn’t being too coherent a minute ago.”
He snapped his head up to stare at her. “It’s all right,” he said warily. “My nanites are already taking care of it.”
Curiosity perked in her. “Well, let me see that.”
After another long look, he tilted forward away from the wall, and she crouched beside him.
The thin flannel of his classic Western shirt was as neatly shredded as if a surgical blade had a go at him. She whistled softly under her breath. “Your yurk is well-designed to fight.”
He shrugged his shoulder, nudging her hovering hand. “Those are just its baby teeth. It swallows things whole once it’s full-grown.”
A jolt somewhere between dismay and interest went through her. “How much bigger will it get?”
“We ride them into battle,” he admitted. “In low-tech battles, they are efficient, flexible, and intimidating as hell. And in high-tech wars…somehow they are worse.”
She huffed under her breath. “I can imagine.”
He looked up at her, squinting. “Can you?”
Now that she knew what she was looking at, she couldn’t believe she ever saw anything besides bizarre alien tech in the silver circuitry of his eyes and scars and in the yurk’s shell markings. But he was right; she’d only seen what she knew to see. How embarrassing to be so small minded, so…human.
She forced her gaze away from his, redirecting her attention to the wound in his shoulder. Under the scientifically neutral prodding of her fingers, his heavy musculature felt like any brawny, sexy male… Wait, brawny, yes. Sexy? Was that a scientific term? Maybe not, but his skin was warm, sleek, and as she watched, the parallel gashes in his flesh that lined up the holes in his shirt were slowly closing, leaving only a silvery cicatrix behind.
“Think of all the good you could do with this technology,” she murmured.
He turned his face away. “The nanites have to be specifically calibrated to my body,” he explained. “They wouldn’t work for anyone else. And they don’t come cheap. Much of my augmentation is considered illegal and immoral under transgalactic edicts.”
“But it was forced on you.”
“Most of it was done when I was still in a hypergrow stasis field. By the time I came out to start my tuning and indoctrination, it was made clear to me I could never say no.”
She ran her hands down his arm, noting the bulge of muscle, the twist of veins under her fingertips. She took his hand in hers and turned it back and forth curiously. His hands were so big, almost two of hers, the knuckles thick, the pads of his fingers calloused. Just like any rancher.
She frowned. “Why are you built so human? Why not more alien? Like the yurk.”
That little twist at the corner of his mouth appeared again. “Technically, to the rest of the universe, you’re the one who is alien.”
“Technically,” she snorted.
“Also,” he said in a pedantic tone, “we call you Earthers. Or, in some translations, Dirters.”
She grimaced. “I guess calling our planet Earth is a bit literal, isn’t it?”
“You’d be shocked at how many Earths there are in the universe. Everyone thinks they’re the only ones. Until they discover they aren’t.”
“Definitely a shock, I gotta say,” she muttered.
“As for this shape, you’d be equally surprised at how many versions of this there are in the universe. There’s a reason why your species, and so many others in this configuration, became the dominant forces on their planets. Some things are just everywhere. Bilateral symmetry. A love of donuts. War.” He looked down at his hand that she was still holding and made a fist.
A bloodless gash opened up in his wrist.
She gasped, but at least she managed not to scream this time. Maybe she was getting used to shocks. She peered into the hole he’d revealed, wondering at the metallic components and the strange viscous gel inside. “What is this?”
“If I was fully activated and had access to the gear that was lost in the crash, I could replace some of my limbs with other equipment. Tools, weapons, that sort of thing.” He looked up at her, his silver eyes flat. “Would that look alien enough for you?”
She let go of his hand, gripped instead by a sudden urge to apologize. Why, she wasn’t sure. She wasn’t the one who had invaded his world. Except he hadn’t invaded, he’d been lost. “And you never want to go back?”
“My unit was a serious investment for someone who had dire, apparently felonious needs,” he said. “If we were found, they’d return us to our keyholder to use however they saw fit.”
She shook her head. “That’s slavery. Even us clueless, primitive Earthers don’t allow that anymore.”
“I’m not technically a person any more than the yurk is,” he said in a tight voice. “Here, you keep animals for work and as pets. And for food. “
“I’m vegetarian,” she protested. But she upgraded her phone whenever she had the chance…
Again that hint of a smile. “You’ll find a lot of humanoid beings in the universe,” he drawled. “But I’ll tell you someday about the sentient vegetative beings.”
She groaned. “Really?”
“The universe is vast. Whatever you’ve imagined—aliens, dragons, slaves—it’s out there, somewhere.”
She’d thought she’d been doing pretty damn good up till now—that one scream aside—but now her legs buckled. She sank down beside him, her knees pressing against his thigh. “Mach,” she whispered. “How can I—?”
A booming crash from the bathroom made her jump to her feet again. Maybe she was weak-kneed from discovering aliens existed, but she quickly regained her strength when she also discovered that aliens big enough to eat her were trying to get out of a locked bathroom.
Mach looked up at her but didn’t rise. “One of my matrix-brothers that died in the crash would’ve had the specialized skills to make sure the yurk is calmed and contained. I don’t. But you do.
Will you finish this job?”
She stared at him in disbelief. “How can I possibly know more than you?”
“It’s an animal. You know animals.” He shrugged in that hopeless way that tugged at her heart. “It’s the only one of its kind here. I want it to have a chance.”
It was alone. Like he and his “brothers” were.
She scrubbed her hands over her face, as if that would wake her up from this crazy dream. Covering her eyes, she listened to the ominous silence that had settled on the other side of the door. “I don’t think it’ll make friends with just a few cookies.”
“I have a rack of ribs in the freezer. That should distract it long enough for you to do a physical exam.”
She shuddered, but… She did want to look at it again. “All right. But since you have the self-healing skin, you’re going in first.”
He smiled, and her heart skipped again. Not because of his smile, she told herself, just fear at facing that beast again. “You are practical as well as pretty.”
Letting her hands drop to her sides, she scowled at him. “What does pretty have to do with anything?”
“According to your mythology, dragons like pretty maidens.”
“They eat pretty maidens,” she corrected tartly. “And according to my meticulous, in-depth research as of this morning, that mythology is apparently accurate.” She gazed at him and then couldn’t hold back a wry smile. “You aren’t a knight in shining armor, but you come from the night sky and have shiny skin, so I guess that’s close enough.”
He finally pushed to his feet, towering over her. “We’re called Custom War Bionic/Organic Impersons, although civilized galaxies know us by the acronym.”
She repeated the words quietly in her head. “CWBOI… Cowboy. Really, they call you cowboys?”
He tucked his chin. “What? No, in the parlance of the consortium that spawns us, our designation—the closest translation to your language—is shroud. We’re dropped into battle under cover of darkness and chaos, anonymous in not-shining armor, leaving dead bodies under us.”
Shrouds. What a grim and menacing name, not just anonymous and impersonal but utterly erasing his own personhood and that of the victims. Anger on his behalf rippled through her, leaving her queasy. Beyond the occasional post-movie date discussion, she’d never given much thought to the existence of extraterrestrials, but she would’ve hoped mastering faster-than-light travel would go hand in hand with higher-than-average moral principles. But apparently not.
She knew she was exhausted and still in shock, practically punch-drunk, when they stood in front of the huge chest freezer and she stared down with a quasi-hysterical sick chuckle. “You’re not going to, like, chop me up and throw me in there, right?”
He glanced over his shoulder at her. “My nanites can convert almost any carbon-based matter into energy,” he said seriously. “So I too am mostly vegetarian.”
Letting out an exaggerated breath of relief, she peered past him into the depths of the packed freezer. “If you’re a vegetarian, mostly, why do you have so much frozen meat?”
“One of my surviving matrix-brothers…well, he has other needs.” He pulled out an entire rack of beef ribs plus a smaller bundle. “Also, Chip and Pickle like turkey necks.”
At the back door of the kitchen, the dogs received their gifts happily but made no move into the house.
Lun-mei looked at them. “They knew.”
Mach touched each of the dogs on the head, which they accepted with good grace before taking their prizes away. “If your Earth has one treasure to share with the universe, it is dogs.”
She followed him back toward the bathroom. “So they are just real dogs, not alien dogs?”
“Sadly, yes. If I could find a way to share my nanites with them, I would so I’d never have to be without them.”
Her throat tightened at the sincerity in his voice. Alien killer he might be, but she couldn’t entirely hate any man who loved his dogs.
But then it was time to face his other pet. She gulped audibly and then tried to turn it into a chuckle. “Maybe this is one time I would like a big game gun,” she admitted. “With tranquilizer darts, not lethal ammunition, but still.”
His arms full of dead cow that he thought just might satisfy the beast inside, Mach turned to her. “I won’t let it hurt you, Doctor Chien,” he promised. “I’ll take its bite again for you, every time.”
She gazed up at him wordlessly. Even Chihuahua owners wouldn’t make that promise to her, figuring stitches and rabies shots were part of her fees. Was this what those extraterrestrial slave owners paid for? This unsparing guarantee of loyalty unto death.
She refused to agree with those unknown beings. They were the monsters, not Mach or his yurk. But she could reluctantly understand the temptation.
Loyalty, slavery, loneliness. She was just a lowly animal doctor, without the scholarly background to argue these elemental matters. Which was probably fine. The yurk didn’t care if she could quote Shakespeare.
“Come when I call,” Mach said, interrupting her philosophical thoughts. “If I don’t call…” His jaw flexed. “Maybe get that big gun.”
Before she could reply, he yanked open the bathroom door and disappeared inside, then slammed it shut behind him.
She gasped his name, but it was too late. He was gone. She put her hand on the door. All was disturbingly quiet inside.
“Mach?” She tried to keep her voice steady. “Everything good in there?”
What was her duty to her clients—hell, what was her duty to her world if there was an alien predator loose in Big Sky Country?
Before she had to make the decision to return to her truck and retrieve her second vet bag—the one with the lethal pharmaceuticals for euthanasia and the .45 pistol for the cases where she failed—she heard a little chirrup of pleasure through the door.
Oh god, was the yurk snacking on Mach’s neck like the dogs were snarfing the turkey bits outside?
Instead of screaming, he called out, “Come on in. Slowly.”
She took a steadying breath. He didn’t sound like he was being chewed on. Cautiously, she turned the doorknob and peeked inside. The room, seeming so spacious if strange before, now looked much smaller and utterly surrealistic.
Was it possible the yurk had grown in the short time they’d been away? She didn’t know enough of alien physiology to make that call, of course, but Mach had said they were engineered to mature quickly. If his nanotechnology could retard aging, surely it could speed the process as well. Regardless, the dinosaur chick was now aiming for Jurassic-level big.
The alien creature perched on the side of the tub with its wings half spread, head low but its snaky neck torqued back and its red-gulleted maw stretched wide. For all its gargantuan proportions and fiendish black and red coloration, it resembled nothing so much as a very large, very ugly, very dangerous baby bird.
Except the wicked claws on its hind feet had pierced the marble stone of the tub.
Mach was murmuring softly as he tossed entire rib bones into its mouth, and Lun-mei stiffened when she realized he was actually talking to her. “Come around my right side slowly,” he murmured. “I think she hurt herself smashing against the broken pipe.”
When had it become she? Lun-mei supposed she was glad he knew its sex because accurately sexing birds and reptiles was a tricky business. For the vet and the beasts.
“I’m sorry, little one,” he crooned. “I’m supposed to be your Alpha and have already failed you.”
He was talking to the yurk this time, she realized. Quietly she slipped around his elbow, focusing a wary eye on the big alien.
Both big aliens.
Mach kept a grip on the rib bone, making the yurk gnaw at one end. Though it gave a plaintive cheep of displeasure, it settled to chewing, ignoring her as she leaned in closer.
“She didn’t hurt herself,” she reassured him, “or at least it was nothing you or she did purposely. That’s where the umbilical c
ord connected. It is a little raw, probably from being hatched so rudely.” She backed away, reaching for the vet bag that she’d unceremoniously abandoned in the corner when the yurk had jumped out of the shell.
The creature seemed more mellow, whether that was Mach’s presence or the plentiful beef bones, she wasn’t sure. But she felt confident enough to turn her attention to her bag to find the antibiotic salve. But then she hesitated again. “Can I touch it—her?”
“Yes, she’s quieting down now.” He cast a quick, worried glance over his shoulder at the salve bottle. “It won’t hurt her, will it?”
Lun-mei restrained a chuckle. Okay, there was the fretful pet owner she knew so well. “It’s just a bit of healing ointment,” she told him. “I assume the yurk has nanotech like you do? But she’s a newborn, so let’s give her immune system, artificial or not, a chance to kick in.” She crept in close, slathering her palm with ointment. “If you could get a fresh rib, so she doesn’t go after mine…”
“She won’t eat you,” he murmured. “Now that she’s imprinting on me, she’ll follow my lead.”
Was that what he meant by being alpha? Moving in under his arm again while he held the bone, she tentatively ran her goopy hand around the umbilicus. The yurk shifted restlessly, her claws screeching on the stone, but Mach waved the rib bone and she settled.
Lun-mei squeezed a bit more salve over the location, but already she thought she saw a hint of silver around the raw skin. The response was slower than Mach’s but it seemed to indicate everything would be fine.
While he had the beast distracted, she took a moment to do a quick examination. She’d not had much experience with reptiles but she’d held a few large pet snakes, and the strong, tensile flex of the yurk’s belly felt similar. The scales, glossy black but edged in hues of red from ruby pink to crimson purple, were almost as large as her palm but satiny smooth, a pleasure to touch.