The morning after their forbidden flight, Delta fed and inspected the yurk. She ate more than usual, but she was still growing and her nanites hadn’t reached full capacity so she wasn’t running at a hundred percent efficiency yet.
And after last night, Delta figured he was somewhere in the thirties.
He couldn’t believe they’d been spotted. Who fed their cows at midnight? Their neighbor at the Strix Springs Ranch, apparently. A good thing to know, he supposed, for next time they flew. Just as well they’d never recovered any of the tech from their crash that would’ve allowed the yurk to have limited verbal interactions.
If she ratted him out to their matrix Alpha, he’d spend the rest of his more or less immortal days at zero efficiency once Mach was done with him.
And rightly so. He knew they must never be identified as CWBOIS—Custom War Bionic/Organic Impersons. This planet didn’t have genetically and cybernetically enhanced killers (not that they hadn’t caused plenty of impressive mayhem on their own) and didn’t acknowledge the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, so the only way to hide here was for the surviving martrix-kin to keep their heads down.
Which by any stretch of the definition did not include flying.
But the yurk had wings that needed to be used, and Delta…had needs of his own.
Watching his Alpha imprint on the pretty little Diamond Valley veterinarian had triggered some unpleasant subroutine in his latent programming: jealousy. That they’d gone off to Bozeman for the weekend, researching a coding specialist for some reason they hadn’t seen fit to explain to him, only made the seething in his gut worse.
He was just a Delta V, the most expendable Delta of the matrix, so he’d learned not to expect consideration of any sort. Unless being considered cannon fodder counted as consideration.
The jealousy was making him unreasonable, of course. All shrouds like him and the rest of the matrix were expendable—expensive, but ultimately doomed. They were sent on their missions, where they wrapped their targets in destruction, but they too were ultimately discarded.
Maybe someday he’d recover enough emotional depth—feelings having been rejected as mostly superfluous in a shroud—to be angry.
And maybe… That someday could be now.
Imprinted on Lun-mei, Mach was more than just Machine One in an anonymous matrix. He became himself when he was with her. And with his systems aligned solely to her, he was protected from their keyholder if that unknown being ever came to reclaim them.
Delta wanted that for himself. There was only one pretty little female vet named Lun-mei in Carbon County, so he couldn’t have exactly that for himself—also, Mach would deactivate him if he tried to hack her affections.
But he’d figured out that he didn’t need exactly her, just something like her. So he made a list of all the most important characteristics that would be necessary for imprinting.
Small probably. Lun-mei was very short and slight. A portion of his programming was geared for the protection of his keyholder, and vulnerability would help trigger that subsystem.
A liking for donuts was important. So he noted “must be sweet.”
Single, small, and sweet. That seemed doable, even in Diamond Valley.
But last night, he’d seen Lindy Minervudottir.
Oh, he’d seen her before. The Minervudottir females had been around almost as long as he and his matrix-brothers. Earthers assumed Mach and he were the sons or grandsons of the original rancher. With their nanites, they were able to adjust a few minor aspects of their appearance, enough to pass unremarked through the century as long as they didn’t call attention to themselves. Last night, he’d caught her attention and he’d seen her.
She was not small. She was not sweet. And he wasn’t entirely certain she was single. Missus usually indicated a connection to another, and she’d been with a female starting about a decade ago, although that connection was severed when the female died. Perhaps her imprinting capabilities were permanently damaged by that loss. When keyholders died, any shrouds imprinted to their command were deactivated, but Lindy was very much alive. The snap of her voice and glitter in her eyes had pinged off his awareness even with all the night sky between them.
Did that mean she’d been the keyholder? If so, she was strong. Lun-mei was also strong, although he’d forgotten to note that because she was also small and sweet.
This list was getting complicated, and Lindy met only one of the criteria for sure.
But she had two incontrovertible pluses: She was close and she’d seen him flying on the yurk.
So after his chores were completed, he carefully packed up the last donut (chocolate, with sprinkles) into a container on the farm truck and headed down the road for the Strix Springs Ranch.
It was already midday and he happened to know she’d gotten a very early start on her chores, so he took a chance that she’d be somewhere near the house and followed the split rail fence up the driveway. Although the Strix Springs house wasn’t as large or ornate as the main building at the Fallen A (Delta had heard Lun-mei describe it as a Russian Orthodox bordello, much to Mach’s chagrin) Lindy’s home had all the symmetrical elegance of a classic farmhouse. Dark gray roof and white shingles shining in the crisp October sun, the two upper dormer windows watched him approach like a pair of disapproving eyes under arched eyebrow eaves.
Clutching the donut box in front of him like a blaster shield, he angled warily toward the front porch. Wrought in iron, a larger version of the ranch brand—two circles with central points, touching at one point along their circumference—decorated the lintel, and they too looked like judgmental eyes. In his hundred and fifty years on this planet, walking up to doors unannounced had gotten him shot at, chased by dogs, yelled at, and sometimes just ignored. And they didn’t even know he was an alien shroud. Maybe there was a reason none of the transgalactic community visited Earth.
But here, only a couple of cats sprawled in the sunlight slanting across the porch. One was brown and black and the other was gray and white, both with the lean build of born predators. They watched him through slitted eyes even more condemning than the house and the brand combined, because as predators, they recognized one of their own.
Delta kept track of them from the periphery of his wide-angle vision because he’d been attacked by cats before too. Now that he thought about it, the one element in all of his unwelcome encounters…was him.
He hugged the donut to his chest. Might be that this was a terrible idea.
Before he could retreat—shrouds never ran away, but strategic withdrawal was always a reasonable option—the front door opened and Lindy stepped out, holding a cup of coffee.
They stared at each other for a long moment, the only movement the soft coil of steam unspooling from her overfilled mug. The rich scent of the coffee filtered down the front steps and curled around him like an invisible lasso. He was tall enough that the three porch steps put him at eye level with her coffee mug, and he caught a glimmer in the coffee as a concealed tremor in her hand sent the ripple through the dark liquid.
The cats broke the impasse, rising simultaneously to their feet and slinking off the side of the porch. Delta wasn’t sure if they’d been guarding the house, waiting for her, or if she’d caught them slacking off their mouser duties. He watched them go—didn’t want to be outflanked by vicious killers—before sliding his gaze back to her.
She huffed out a breath that ripped apart the coffee steam. “I guess I’m still dreaming.”
He didn’t move. Was she saying she’d dreamed of him last night? As he’d told her, he didn’t dream, ever. But he didn’t sleep either. He’d laid in his bed in a neutral mode, staring up at the ceiling and thinking of her. Which was the closest a CWBOI could get to dreaming.
His gaze dropped to the mug in her hand. “How did you know I was coming?”
“Didn’t. Coffee’s not for you.” She took a deliberate sip from the mug, watching him over the rim.
He imagined her lips on the ripple of her initial surprise, not that her Earther senses could detect the infinitesimal waves of energy that had disturbed the surface tension. His own specs weren’t really up to that task either; he was no Beta, Gamma, or Theta to need that sort of sensitivity. And yet somehow he seemed to feel the ripples, wince at the heat she hadn’t waited to dissipate.
Struck wordless by this strange cascade of unlikely input, he just waited for her to finish her sip.
Finally she lowered the mug, her gaze too dropping to the box in his hand. “You didn’t come here with some mind wiping thing, did you?” She lifted one eyebrow. “I’m a taxpaying citizen of the United States of America, and my own army ought not to be erasing people’s memories. Also, my rifle’s just inside the front door, and I’m pretty sure I can get to it before you can get to me.”
He was pretty sure she couldn’t, but he hadn’t come here to show off his inhuman abilities. At least not quite yet.
He held out the box. “I brought you a donut,” he announced. “It’s day-old, but it’s chocolate.” Mach and Lun-mei had brought him a box of a dozen from Diamond Valley Depot before they left for Bozeman. They told him under no circumstances should he be wandering into town while they were gone. Wandering to the neighbor ranch, they hadn’t mentioned.
Lindy stared at the box only slightly less suspiciously than she’d stared at him. “I’m not really into sweets.”
He recoiled, clutching the box tighter. “What?”
Another snort from her. “Not every woman loves chocolate.”
Okay, sometimes even lethal killer robots needed to run away.
Swiveling on his boot heel, Delta headed back for his truck.
“Hey! Where are you going?”
He glanced back over his shoulder. “I can’t be with a female who doesn’t love chocolate.”
She sputtered. “Can’t be… What the hell, Halley?”
He pivoted back to face her over the distance of a few strides. She was leaning against the porch rail, her lips and brow twisted with confusion. A lifetime’s worth of summer sun and winter wind—and dynamic expressions like this one—had left lines on her face that would never go away. If he could map them all, maybe he could know her well enough to anticipate how to make her smile, how to get her to look at him the way Lun-mei looked at Mach. That must be the key to imprinting.
He realized he’d been silent too long when she set her mug on the porch rail and straightened. He was just far enough away from her now that she might get to her rifle before he got to her…
“Fine,” she growled. “Do you want a cup?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said meekly.
“Only you can’t ma’am me. I’m not that old and I’m not your commanding officer.” She turned away and went inside, letting the screen door slam behind her.
Cautiously, he approached the steps again, watching for cats and rifle muzzles. But there was only her mug on the rail, waiting for her return. So he waited too. Waited to see if he might make her his commander, his master, his keyholder.
Every module of every subsystem in him seemed to hang in waiting mode.
She was back in just a minute with a second mug. No rifle. “It’s rewarmed from this morning’s pot,” she said. “Tastes a little burnt. Should go perfect with your day-old donut.”
His nanites didn’t care what carbon-based material he gave them to convert to energy. She held out the mug, and though this felt a bit like a trap, he walked up the three steps to accept it.
The thick ceramic was cool in his hand, but inside he felt the warmth slowly permeating. Maybe Lindy Minervudottir was the same.
But nowhere in his programming did he have the skills to bring out such feelings in her. CWBOIs didn’t normally need to force imprinting; it happened automatically when their keyholder activated them. After crash-landing before their activation, his matrix had gone a hundred and fifty years in unclaimed mode, never realizing they could imprint without an identified keyholder.
Still, Mach had done it with Lun-mei, and his Alpha was terrible with Earther interactions. Delta was the one who’d discovered donuts. And beer. While Mach had rustled their first cattle—back in the early days when that had seemed like a good idea—Delta had been the one to make sure their claim to the land of the Fallen A met Earther legal standards. And he wasn’t even a Theta who had the clever spy/assassin subroutines to master bank and county registrar paperwork.
Surely he could decode this one Earther female. Even if she didn’t like chocolate.
He peered sidelong at her. “If you don’t want the donut…”
Canting her hip against the rail, she waved one hand at him. “Eat it.”
Over the rim of her mug, she watched him as he reverently lifted the ring of fried dough from the box. It wasn’t until he took that first bite that a subtle tension in her spine eased, and he realized she’d thought his gift to her was drugged. As if he’d ruin a donut.
“I just wanted to apologize again for startling you last night.” He looked down at the half a donut that remained after his first bite. “But this was my way of saying sorry.”
Her lips quirked to one side. “I thought we agreed to say that was just a dream.”
“Well, I’m sorry for trespassing in your dreams.”
After a moment, she nodded. “Forget about it. It was a weird night.”
He nodded. “Imagine how the cows felt when they woke and the sweet hay was already there, smelling like spring.”
She gazed at him. “Odd way of thinking.”
He hesitated. “The cows? Or me?”
With a slight shake of her head, she seemed to dismiss the question. “The hay smells like that because of some herbal concoction one of my interns invented. Supposed to improve resilience.” She shrugged.
He perked up at the story. “It’s good to be open to new ideas.” New ideas like, say, extraterrestrial invaders who just wanted to stay on Earth and be ignored.
“They get room and board and I get ranch hands and cow potpourri. Seems like a fair trade.”
With him, she’d get an essentially immortal being enslaved to her will. That was almost as good as potpourri, right? And he could keep all the donuts. This seemed ideal.
But how to convince her?
At least she already knew some of his secrets. He took a careful swallow of the hot coffee. “I wonder if the yurk would like the herbs.”
She stiffened. “Weren’t we not talking about that?”
“Since you’ve already seen me at my worst, I sort of think we are okay,” he told her.
Although he hadn’t intended to invite her scrutiny, her gaze flicked over him once, an assessment he felt all the way up his body, as if all his nanites were sitting up at attention like the Fallen A ranch dogs, Chip and Pickle, being offered a meaty bone.
To his surprise, a faint flush colored her cheeks. In the height of summer, if she’d been sunburned, or the depths of winter when she’d be wind-burned, he wouldn’t have even noticed the rose-petal pink. Such a delicate color for a female of her stature. A reminder, he decided, that the same blood flowed in all of them.
Not in him, of course. His blood was full of nanites which tended toward gray. He’d been among the Earthers long enough to notice—unlike Mach who hadn’t cared before Lun-mei—that there was more than one explanation for red in the face. Anger, shame, sickness. But he didn’t think Lindy’s blush was any of that.
She desired him.
He took a deep, surreptitious breath, and widened his stance, making himself look bigger. As a Delta V, he wasn’t one of the largest in his matrix, but he was built more substantially than most Earthers. Surely she would take that into account when she contemplated his usefulness.
More of him to desire.
Although he was back in his standard Earther disguise of properly worn-down blue denim and checkered cotton shirt along with the wide-brimmed hat that helped disguise the nanite pathways burning under his skin, her gaze tracked over him as if he were still in his armor from the night before. Almost all their specialized equipment had been lost or destroyed in the crash, but they’d been shipped in their under armor. And good thing too, or they would’ve spent their first days on their new planet utterly nude, which would’ve earned them more stares than the tight, black plates of thin plasteel. The plates were specifically measured to his musculature, meant to move like a second skin, but for the first time he was aware of how it displayed every part of his body, as if he were naked.
His skin, his muscles, his bones, even the synthetic implants in between seemed to ache with the intensity of her gaze. His throat tightened with the urge to ask her what she was thinking, but somehow he knew that was the wrong question. He had chosen her already, but she didn’t yet know he was hers.
And unlike Mach, who confined most of his study to practical knowledge of their adopted homeworld, Delta had borrowed from most of the shelves in Diamond Valley Depot’s small library. And from his reading of romance novels, he was uneasily aware that his behavior toward Lindy was bordering on…creepery.
But he couldn’t tell her everything about him, not yet, not until she’d fallen in love with him.
The interest in her gaze was a good first step, wasn’t it? And she had freely, if reluctantly, offered him a cup of coffee. As connective rituals went, he seemed right on track.
Next, there must be some sort of physical interaction. He knew Mach had taken Lun-mei home one night and wooed her with the overwhelming majesty of his alien lovemaking. Perhaps he should try that.
Aware that he might be missing a few steps, the overwhelming urgency of this moment left him vague on the intervening stages. Seduction wasn’t covered in his built-in programming or trained wargames. And honestly, sometimes he didn’t read every single page of his romances; he liked to jump to the end where the lovers declared their permanent bond. Sometimes the hard part in the middle—with its loneliness and confusion—was too much for him to stand.
Which was a problem now, he realized. Maybe that was the point of the books—to show Earthers how to get through the hard parts until the happily ever after.
Well, he’d figure this out. He might be just a Delta V, but the book characters solved their problems in only a couple hundred pages, so how hard could it be?
In the seconds of his racing thoughts, Lindy took another drink of coffee, maybe hoping to disguise the flush in her cheeks. “Why do I get the feeling that you didn’t come here just for apologies, herbs, or to pass off leftover pastries?” She locked her gaze on him, as if her momentary flash of desire meant nothing. “Be straight with me now, Halley, because I got no use for crooked.” Despite the seriousness of her words, her lips curved. “Queer, yes. Crooked, no.”
If not for his romance novels, he might have been confused by her meaning. He hadn’t realized she was queer—although now that he thought about the other female who’d worked alongside her for years, it seemed obvious. Maybe he should stop nagging Mach about his obliviousness.
“I came to court you,” he said. Wait, no, that wording was more in line with the era when the matrix ship had crashed. “I mean ask you on a date.”
Now it was her turn to fall silent, staring at him in consternation. Which was fine. He could stare at her all day. She was easy to look at, with her eyes like clear skies, her skin textured with the same contours as the valley—lines and curves, rough and smooth—oh, and now brightened again with that perfect chroma of pink like a wild rose in bloom.
That last might’ve been slightly influenced by the romance novels.
She sputtered. “You are kidding me.”
“I didn’t know you were gay,” he explained. “I thought I had a chance.”
“Not with a stale-ass donut,” she muttered.
He gave her a wounded look. “It was chocolate. The last one.” Then he straightened, clutching his mug. “Do you mean if I’d brought fresh trout jerky—”
She held up one hand. “Stop right there. I don’t mean anything.” Her blue eyes were narrowed. But that telltale pink blush remained. “You’re too young, too close, and not my type.”
“Because I present as male.” He looked down at his clenched hands. While his nanites could disguise and even rearrange some of his physiology, his base model had been selected for its raw morphological potential: easier to grow bigger, tougher, more aggressive.
All lies, of course, or at least bias. But the consortium that built him had never been interested in fairness.
“You are very definitely male.” Lindy took another sip of her coffee. “Not that that’s a deal-breaker for me.”
So he did have a chance. His pulse jumped as his nanites prepared for battle. “And I’m not as young as I look,” he interrupted. He made an internal note to direct his nanites to add more lines to his face when she wasn’t looking. “And I’m not really that close. We have two thousand acres between us, so you wouldn’t have to worry that I’ll intrude too much. Unless you want me to.” He peered at her questioningly.
She made a low noise in the back of her throat, almost a growl. “Yeah, and I suppose you could always fly away on your dragon.”
“Yurk,” he reminded her. “I thought we were pretending that didn’t happen.”
She gazed at him steadily. “And that’s why you’re not my type, Delta Halley. You have too many secrets lurking in those gray eyes. I’m long done with secrets about who I am and what I want.”
Of course she sensed he was lying to her. The ranch was in some ways its own world, and she was its sole mistress since she’d lost her mate five years ago. No wonder she wasn’t interested in his bumbling seduction. Still, she was his best chance for imprinting, having already seen the yurk and being close enough that their shared flightpath wouldn’t attract more attention. He didn’t need her to love him, just to lock down the keyholder pathways in his programming that would make him vulnerable to reclamation and enslavement again. She obviously didn’t need love from him—an unnatural, unfeeling construct of dubious origin—not when she’d had the real thing. Still, they could be something to each other if she’d give him a chance.
“Everyone has secrets,” he told her, trying to keep the desperation out of his voice. “That’s why you go on dates. To strip them bare.”
“Strip them bare,” she mused, eyeing him.
“The secrets, I mean. Obviously.”
“Obviously.”
She took a step toward him, and the shockwave of heat from her coffee mug and her body belled against his sensors, triggering a warning deep inside him. He thought it was a warning anyway; something panged in his core and stood at attention, and it wasn’t his nanites.
She gazed up at him. She was tall and big for a woman, but of course he was taller and bigger, having been designed and built to dominate entire worlds. And yet when he looked down into her eyes, he was the one who was falling, delving deeper as if he might find the midnight stars behind the clear blue.
She leaned toward him, and he caught the whiff of her personal scent. No synthetic perfumes, just the same soap he used—how convenient—and healthy sweat, fresh straw, and cold air. He took a deep breath of her fragrance, marking it in his most primitive subroutines. He’d know her anywhere now. This was just like in his favorite romance novels…
To his shock, she plucked the coffee cup from his slack hands. For a heartbeat, his hands stayed right there, holding nothing. Good thing it hadn’t been his blaster; that would’ve been embarrassing for a genetically and cybernetically enhanced killer.
She stepped back, setting both mugs on the rail behind her. “Okay, well, this has been really…enlightening. I think it’s time we both got back to work.”
Though he hated the loss of her body heat and scent, he stepped back too. “Okay,” he said agreeably. “I’ll see you around. Or over, whatever.” He flashed her a grin that he’d learned from the working ladies in the dusty saloons back when the ship had crashed in this world’s Wild West days. It was a smile that said I’m here, I’m available, and I’ll hardly cost you more than a couple pennies.
Lindy’s breath caught, just the slightest hitch. But he was attuned to her now and didn’t miss it.
He turned and descended the porch steps, heading for his truck. He had just enough strategic sense as a Delta not to look back, but he flashed a goodbye gesture over his shoulder. Two fingers flickering in what could be a friendly farmer wave, a sign of peace, or—if she wanted to read more deeply—a promise for the two of them becoming one.
When he left the Strix Springs Ranch, he wheeled the truck toward town. Never mind what Mach and Lun-mei had told him. He needed to get some more romance novels from the library and catch a clear enough electronic signal to download a copy of the Intergalactic Dating Agency’s Guide to Romancing an Alien. Yes, there might be secrets and grief and danger and questionably compatible biology between them, but she hadn’t shot him down yet and, as she told him, her rifle had been right there by the door.
He pressed the first knuckle of his fist to his lips, pretending the lingering warmth of the coffee mug was the heat of her body, and was surprised to find his hand shaking. Deltas might be the least of the matrix, but he knew from his reading of this world’s mythologies that even the lowest knight errant had to pledge his life to someone. And Lindy Minervudottir was going to be his queen.