by Elsa Jade
He cursed the low-nanite fog that kept him from easily parsing the contents of his archives. He’d encountered many beings in more than a century on Earth, but he should be able to remember them all.
“Hey there, cowboy. I’ve been looking for you.”
The soft lilt of her drawl made the connection that his nanites couldn’t. No wonder he’d forgotten, but the sound of her voice transported him all the way back to his first days on this wretched planet.
He gazed at her in consternation as she strolled toward him. Earthers didn’t live this long, so how was she here?
She looked older, but not a hundred and fifty years older. The pockmarks on her cheeks remained, but her face had filled out from the hungry, sallow girl he’d first seen. Though she was still just a shorty bit of a thing, she held her spine taut, straightening out the indolent sway that had enticed weak-willed drunkards out of their coin.
Not just how but why was she here? In this century, in his house. A belated note of alarm went up from his depleted nanites, and he almost snorted. Day late and a silver dollar short.
“Well, I’ll be a plugged nickel in a shooting gallery of one-eyed cardsharps,” he murmured in the same long-gone cadences she had used. “Never thought I’d see you again, miss.”
“Nell,” she reminded him. “Nell Dearly. Not that we were ever formally introduced before you drugged me, robbed the saloon, and left me with nothing.”
He waggled a finger at her. “Hey there now. I left you with some good diamonds and bad opium. Both of which were your stated price.”
And then for some reason, he remembered the last boon she’d demanded of him.
That hadn’t been his last kiss over the decades but the memory pulsed through him now with the sweet-bitter bite of doctored whiskey.
He smiled at her slyly. “We have history together. Let’s not forget what we shared so long ago.”
She raised one eyebrow and although the haze of cataracts still clouded her eyes like ice on a churning, muddy river, the organic part of his spine—unaffected by the loss of his nanites—prickled with the surety that she saw clear through him.
There was not anything there he wanted anyone to see.
“Relieved to hear you remember back that far,” she said with an answering smile. “Since I come with a message from your past, star man.”
He tilted his head. “A message? From whom?”
“Your keyholder.” Nell extended her arm toward him, and though the weapon in her hand was no larger than a lady’s snub-nosed derringer from the time they’d shared before, he knew it would pack much more punch. “She says, ‘Where the hell have you been?’”
The blaster pulse caught him square in the chest. Even if he’d had a complete nanite load, fully charged, he still would’ve gone down. But he’d at least have had time to laugh.
In every scenario he might’ve considered, he’d never have imagined one where his past caught up to him in the willowy shape of an angry saloon girl.
Chapter 3
Nell Dearly stared down at the fallen shroud, her heartbeat almost as loud in her ears as the thud of his big body hitting the floor. A curl of smoke wafted from the muzzle of the small blaster pistol until her gust of relieved breath scattered it.
“Well,” she murmured. “That went better than I hoped.”
A single shot from the blaster shouldn’t have dropped him that easily. She’d expected to need three at least. Did she have the right target? She peered suspiciously down the short length of the hallway, keeping a safe distance.
But no, she’d never forget the charming cowboy who had come into the saloon and changed her life forever. Changed her not with his diamonds or even the laudanum, but with his nanites.
Setting her teeth, she strode toward him. He’d gone down in a heap, and now she had to move his lanky, leanly muscled shape. Theta shrouds were not as massive as some of their matrix-kin, she’d learned, but Troy Lehigh was still plenty big compared to her.
She eyed him warily as she approached. He’d polished his rough cowboy act. The tumble of brown hair and scruffy beard he’d sported when she’d first seen him in the saloon had been replaced with a neat queue and a trimmed goatee but he had the same green eyes she’d first admired a century and a half ago—a brilliant, glittering green, bright as spring grass that never grew in the dusty cow town where she’d sold herself nightly.
She scowled. If she’d known then what he was, she would’ve shot him right between those pretty eyes.
Except, she had to confess: he’d had a bottle of laudanum, and so she would’ve let him go no matter what the circumstances. Not to mention she’d been a terrible shot in those days.
She was a much better shot now, but she still had to be careful. He was a devious cybernetic monstrosity, and though he was currently crumpled at her feet, she’d never deluded herself that she had any power to make a man swoon, not even when she was new to the sex trade and hoped she might parlay her pussy into real profits. Was he playing possum?
She shook her head. She hadn’t thought of possums in her decades off Earth. But Troy Lehigh was definitely the sort to remind her of varmints.
Calling on her slight reserve of nanite strength, she reached for him. He was tall but not as bulky as she’d first estimated. It was the force of his green stare that made him seem so…overwhelming and left her vaguely breathless. With his eyes closed, she felt more in control.
Besides, if he was pretending, she’d just shoot him again.
Wrestling him out to her car was trickier than shooting him. She had to wrap her arms all the way around his big body, hugging him close. And she didn’t do hugging, not before and certainly not now. Sex for money was one thing, but hugs were…too close, left her too vulnerable.
Grunting and swearing as she hauled him around (there, that was more like the intimacy she remembered from her nights in the saloon) she was glad for the isolation of the house with its gated perimeter and tall trees. When she’d been a working girl, this house would’ve been a castle in her eyes. But what she’d seen since… Well, the Theta was now more valuable to her then any diamonds or drugs.
She shoved him into the passenger seat of the rented subcompact, piling his limbs haphazardly. He hadn’t cared what happened to her so she’d return the favor.
“I should shoot you again just on principle,” she muttered.
Too bad he wasn’t conscious to appreciate her rough frontier justice. She got behind the wheel and headed for the outskirts of town.
Her rented ship was the intergalactic version of a cheap two-door sedan. That had made it easier to slip through planetary security without rousing suspicious. Not that anyone ever suspected a nobody like her of having nefarious schemes. While she’d like to blame Troy Lehigh for having to live a lie, honestly, she’d been a schemer long before him and it had kept her alive.
If she played her cards right, she’d be alive after he was gone too.
After securing the Theta in stasis cuffs in the ship’s tiny open hold, she settled herself in the pilot chair. The small shuttle didn’t have much range or flash, but it—like her pistol, like her body—got the job done. Still, she wished the interior was bigger, to put more room between her and her prisoner.
But hell, all the galaxy wasn’t going to be enough distance to lessen the accusation in his green eyes when he woke.
She kept the mimic shield that camouflaged the shuttle at its highest setting, which slowed her assent but would avoid attracting the attention of local radar or planetary security—or worse yet, the unsavories who sometimes lurked in near-orbit to take advantage of her oblivious homeworld. Maybe she should be more bothered knowing about those predators and scavengers, but her homeworld had taken advantage of her too.
It wasn’t until the shuttle was deep in the black that she let out a short, tight huff of breath and let her shoulders relax from around her ears. She still had a long way to go, but at least she finally had her bargaining chip in hand.
As she reconfigured the mimic shield for standard anonymity and set course, she anticipated heading back to the tiny galley for a cup of coffee. When she’d first arrived on Earth, she’d stopped at a drive-through coffee shop and nearly expired on the spot from the indescribable wonders of a mocha frappuccino. Coffee had changed quite a bit in the century and a half that she’d been away.
Or maybe she’d just never known what pleasure really was. Anyway, she’d bought enough of the beans to make a tidy profit on the niche closed-world market even without the much more valuable cargo in the hold.
But as she rose from her chair, pivoted, and took one step down the central corridor of the shuttle, she locked eyes with that cargo.
The Theta hadn’t moved from the untidy sprawl where she’d dumped him except to open his eyes. Oh, that green glare. It was a good thing she knew that shrouds couldn’t shoot acid or poison or laser beams from their eyeballs or she’d fear dropping dead in her tracks. The transparent plasteel cage of the hold was intended to restrain crates and canisters, not killer robots. The stasis cuffs and her specialized blaster would be her best defenses.
Nervously, she touched the grip of the pistol at her side. Still there.
With a graceful twist that seemed simultaneously boneless and yet terrifyingly strong, the Theta brought himself to his feet. The stasis cuffs around his wrists pulsed as they drained some of the kinetic energy to strengthen their restraints.
He didn’t react to the warning, all his attention focused on her. “Where are you taking me, Nell Dearly?”
Unlike the hillbilly drawl from earlier, his voice now was as smooth and deep as a fall into a black hole—certain to rip her poise to pieces if she didn’t keep her distance.
She clamped her palm over the pistol butt. “Back to your keyholder.”
“And who is that exactly?” He tilted his head as if they were just sitting about drinking thrice-fermented pixberry tea at one of the galactic social gatherings that she found even more wearisome than the saloon’s jolly pretending a century ago.
“Her Most High Excellency, Lady Eletanvine the Seventh, Empress in Exile of Tartaula Secondus.” Nell tilted her head the same way he had. “You didn’t know? I thought Thetas were cleverest of the shroud designations.”
The musing comment came out more rudely than she’d intended, but the stasis cuffs didn’t flicker to indicate even the merest twitch of emotion on his part.
“Our transport crashed a long time ago,” he said. “We shipped with no more than the usual information available to an unkeyed matrix. Which is little enough, and nothing to give us a sense of our original mission. Since Dirt is a backward, closed planet, I had few opportunities to update my files.”
“You seemed quite resourceful by the time I met you,” she said with a hint of the drawl that he’d abandoned. “Sabotage, burglary, seduction.” She flicked her gaze brazenly down his body. Though the fitted denim and linen of his clothes were familiar fabrics from her days on Earth, his lean, honed physique made them seem exotic, and she had to jerk her eyes back up, her face heating. “All your baseline protocols seem…intact.”
“I did what I could with how they created me,” he said with a bland smile. “Presumably this empress of yours paid for the rest of the activation codes to make me whatever she needed.”
Nell narrowed her eyes at him. Was he really so untouched at the thought of being taken back into servitude? He reminded her of…herself, ages ago. But she’d been awash in laudanum the whole time she was telling herself she didn’t care. He, lucky dog, had that detachment infused into his bones. “I don’t know what the empress has planned for you. It was her grandfather who purchased your matrix to put down a rebellion on Tartaula Secondus. When the consortium transport was reported lost, he hired mercenaries instead, but they absconded with most of his treasury without producing any results.”
“Results,” the Theta murmured. “You mean his mercenaries were not the killers he needed.”
A hint of shame prickled under her arms, a reaction she thought had been burned out of her by hot, groping hands and the fiery wash of bad whiskey, finally left behind in lightyears of forgetfulness. She stiffened against the unpleasant sensation. How dare a killer robot chide her, even indirectly?
“I wasn’t privy to his plans for you either,” she said. “Maybe he meant for you to kiss the rebels into oblivion.”
He laughed, such a perfectly balanced blend of sweetness and dark bitterness that she thought maybe she didn’t need the mocha frappuccino after all.
“Kissed into oblivion?” He shook his head, and the long brown hair loosened from the bound queue at his nape spread across his wide shoulders and down his back. “I would’ve thought a veteran strumpet such as yourself would’ve been resistant to such remedial programming.” His green eyes glinted at her.
Oh-ho, so he was not as impervious to insult as he wanted to seem. Well, maybe he took pride in what he’d been made to do, but she didn’t. She’d hated every moment of it. And she hated this too. Returning him to his rightful owner would be one more stain on the soiled wreckage of her soul, but then she’d be finally free.
Though she stiffened her spine, her voice wavered and cracked when she asked, “Where’s the rest of your matrix? The old emperor paid for a full company of you, and the empress wants you all back.”
“Unfortunately for your empress, the rest of my matrix was lost in the crash. I’m the only one remaining.”
She frowned. “I thought shrouds were supposed to be so tough, nearly indestructible with all the strength and speed and self-repair of your implants and nanites.”
His voice this time was as flat and edged as shattered plasteel. “The transport burned in atmosphere and all but vaporized on impact. I had to regrow the skin and hair burned off and knit bones and implants that were shattered. It wasn’t toughness that saved me, just nanites and luck.” For the first time, a flicker in the stasis cuffs told her he was straining against the bonds even though he didn’t seem to move a muscle. “But it seems my luck has run out.”
“You weren’t lucky back then either,” she reminded him. “You stole the ace that Jed had up his sleeve.”
Another flicker from the cuffs as the Theta chuckled. “You caught that? I’m impressed. Especially considering you were drunk and drugged at the time.”
Shame oozed through her again. She hadn’t used whiskey and opium as a crutch. Even under their influence, she’d known they weren’t holding her up but knocking her on her ass. But as a perpetual veil between her and the saloon, the drugs had served as one last swathing petticoat that no one could ever take off.
She bit her lip. Would just one shroud of the matrix—not even one of the biggies—be enough to earn her freedom from that past? “I think the coffee will be worth more,” she muttered to herself.
The Theta raised one eyebrow. “You took coffee beans from Earth? Do you have a closed-world trader’s license?”
She glowered at him. “Do you have a license for marauding and seducing?”
“No, but…” He held both hands out to his sides and smirked, obviously indicating that he had no choice in the matter.
Well, neither did she. But delivering him to the empress would give her the choices she longed for. “You should be glad I’m taking you back where you belong. As you seem well aware, you’re sly and pretty enough to be a valued member of the empress’s retinue.” She wasn’t as good as he was at keeping the bitterness out of her voice.
“Like you are?” The quirk in the corner of his mouth was sharp enough to sting.
Her jaw felt numb from the way she clenched her teeth. “What do you mean by that?”
He lifted one wrist and gave it a little shake. “The cuffs are registered to Tartaula Secondus, where you said you’re from. Although the disruptor sequence in that blaster is not one I recognize.”
“The sequence is something developed especially for you,” she informed him. She’d learned long ago t
hat the strongest restraints were not the physical ones but the ones she’d inadvertently placed on herself. If she could make him believe he had no chance of escaping her, she was more than halfway to keeping control of him.
Well, maybe not quite halfway.
Although he didn’t move, not even to glare at her, the cuffs flared as they sucked down some invisible surge of his resistance.
That green gaze raked over her with the same arch dismissiveness that she’d given him earlier. “So this empress sent you, an innocent Earther, with shackles for a shroud.” He flicked back a coiling lock of darkened bronze hair. Such a long style on men hadn’t been common in their shared time, and it wasn’t now either; it seemed odd that a cyborg programmed to blend in would indulge in such a look. Her fingers twitched with the urge to follow the loose spiral—and give a hard tug.
Nell bristled at her own wayward impulses. “The empress didn’t send me. This was my idea.” Quickly she weighed the benefits of explaining to him. Making clear to him that she wasn’t the weakling he’d left behind was worth the risk. “I’m not just an Earther anymore. And I was never innocent.” With an effort that she hoped looked more dramatic than reluctant, she lifted her hand off the pistol grip and set it on her outthrust hip in a bold manner. “I commissioned the stasis cuffs with the disruptor sequence and tracked you using the beacon of the nanites that you gave me.”
If he’d been essentially still before, now he was utterly frozen. “I gave you the barest percentage of a battlefield infusion of my nanites. Enough to heal your diseases, but not enough to linger in your system this long, especially without me there to empower them. Each shroud’s nanites are uniquely coded so there’s no way mine could have replicated in you ever since then.”
He’d healed her? Every working girl feared the pox, and she didn’t mean the ones still scarring her cheeks. She forced herself to shrug. “Maybe we were more alike than you realized.”