As the sun was setting, Delta looked up at the first star of the evening, anticipation making his blood thrum.
Two nights ago, after Mach and Lun-mei had busted him with Lindy, and after he told them about the potential return of the Omega, Mach had ordered a patrol of the ranch, hoping to catch a glimpse of their wayward matrix-brother. Though they’d expanded in ever-widening circles, they’d found no sign of him. Not surprising—he was a shroud, after all.
When they returned to the house briefly in the early morning, Mach and Lun-mei got into a fight.
Mach wanted her to go back into town and stay there. “Cosmo is dangerous,” he told her. “Even if he’s just passing through, he can be trouble. Like…a wounded bear.”
“Wrong analogy,” Delta muttered.
Just as he’d expected, Lun-mei put her hands on her hips, her expression mulish in the way of all recalcitrant mules. “I’m a veterinarian,” she reminded Mach. “Wounded animals are kind of my thing.”
Mach glowered. “Cosmo is nobody’s thing. His only purpose as the matrix Omega was to end the fight—quickly and permanently—when all other options were gone. You don’t heal death.”
Delta coughed quietly. Even he knew that was an unfortunate challenge to Lun-mei’s professional skills.
She crossed her arms, and the crackle in her dark eyes made him and the dogs slink away. If Mach wanted midnight fire, good for him; Delta was waiting for clear blue eyes.
But the day went by without a chance to see Lindy. That afternoon, he and Mach widened their patrol for Cosmo, and he was careful not to ask how the fight had ended. Asking a CWBOI such a thing would normally be pointless—shrouds never lost a battle. But in this case, Delta rather suspected that the pretty little lady doc had won the day.
So Mach’s moody silence went unbroken and there was no sign of Cosmo.
But they did find a section of downed fence; just a couple of slack strands over a short distance, but of course the wily cows had found it. A few head of the Fallen A and Strix brands were mixed together, which seemed pleasingly appropriate to Delta.
The two ranches should’ve been this close the whole time. Except of course Lindy hadn’t needed him before now.
Not that she needed-needed him, but he thought maybe he’d made himself somewhat desirable to have around
As the sun was on its downward trajectory, he went to the Strix Springs Ranch to tell Lindy about her escapee cows and see if any of the Fallen A herd had wandered too far her way—and admittedly, merely to see her, to bask in her presence like she was his rising sun. But at the house he found no Lindy, just three young Earther females he recognized only because of his nanites’ diligent recording system.
“Miz Lindy is away for a bit,” one of the females—ID of Taylor—told him. “We’re in charge while she’s gone. Sasha and I will ride out, take a look for your missing cows.”
Sasha, the one in the mobility device, gave him a nod. “Thanks for letting us know.”
Curiously, he eyed the slanting, studded wheels of her device. It was low-tech compared to any of his parts, of course, but the design was elegant enough. Too bad a CWBOI’s nanites were too specifically adapted to share. And probably this girl wouldn’t be interested in becoming a code-slaved killer.
Obviously noting his attention, she stared back at him, her jaw set. “Plenty of ranchers use ATVs these days. You think I can’t round up your cows?”
“I’d be right grateful if you did,” he said, letting his voice fall into the camouflage cadences he’d cultivated for a half-dozen of her lifetimes. “And sorry for the imposition.” He hesitated. “Any idea when Miz Lindy will be around? I was hoping to have a word with her.”
“Just a word?” The third girl, Roxi, snickered. “Is that what the kids are calling it these days?”
Sasha elbowed her in the thigh, but Delta chuckled, and it wasn’t manufactured amusement as disguise. “A gentleman never tells,” he told them.
Roxi smirked. “Huh, never met one of those before.”
He supposed technically she still hadn’t. But he wasn’t explaining that anymore than he would be detailing his kisses with Lindy. “So you expect her back…?” he prodded.
Sasha shook her head. “Later,” she said repressively.
They didn’t quite chase him off, but Taylor on horseback and Sasha in a larger, tougher version of her wheeled chair paced him to the main road before peeling away toward the hills.
He itched to go with them, keep watch over them while Lindy was away. But probably if she trusted them to ride her land, he should trust them too.
Also, he’d been aware that while Sasha and Roxi engaged him in dialogue, Taylor had faded back through the front door—where the rifle was hanging, no doubt. Anyway, she had it in a scabbard at her horse’s withers as they followed him to their boundary, and the ranch dogs ranged behind.
He hoped they never learned how little their small, brave militia could do against even a lone shroud.
Where on Earth was Cosmo?
He spent the rest of that night and the next day searching, to no avail. When night fell again, he ran a training session with the yurk. She was sluggish and snappish—another growth spurt left her sleepy—but he coaxed her through her wing exercises and obedience lessons with individual tiny huckleberries, which she adored. Much better than the sub-lethal blaster prods and involuntary reprogramming that would’ve been her fate as part of an activated matrix.
But after he put her to bed with a rack of raw beef ribs and a loaf of burnt toast, he found himself roaming the yard like his internal mapping system had gone offline. With each circle, he found himself yearning toward his neighbor to the north.
Something inside him stronger than plasteel, fiercer than the yurk, needed-needed-needed to see Lindy.
He held back as long as he could—about a nano-second—and then he saddled his favorite horse and angled overland toward the Strix property.
Since reviving the yurk, Lun-mei had done some careful experiments with the nanites after the aging mare had come up lame on a cold morning. One injection of the nanotech, stripped of most of its code, had left the mare dancing impatiently in her stall. And put a new shine in her hazy eyes.
A silver shine.
She stepped out under the moonlight like a slightly smaller, somewhat wiser version of the yurk, her eager breath pluming in the snappy chill. Delta kept her to a walk; if he broke her leg in a fall, Lun-mei would end him. But he couldn’t keep the anticipation out of his bones and he knew his butt in the saddle was urging the mare forward even as the touch of reins on her neck called for caution.
He crossed between their properties at a wired gate near the newly restrung fence. A barb pierced his palm as he pulled the wire loop back into place, and he grumbled as his nanites rushed to fix the damage. Too bad he couldn’t get nanites to ride the fence line all the time…
As he remounted and turned the mare onward toward the Strix house, a silhouette on the hill stopped the mare in her tracks. She blew out a hard breath and stomped once—a warning.
Yeah, definitely more yurk-like now.
Delta soothed her with a hand on her neck, his own pulse pounding harder.
Because he recognized that pale outline.
His queen, beautiful in the moonlight as the flawed diamond on her finger. Her silver-gold hair was unbound under her hat, and restless strands caught the night wind to blow toward him. That was her only motion toward him.
A tingle of unease trickled through him as he guided the mare closer. Not that he minded going to Lindy—he was the one trespassing, technically, and he’d always find an excuse to bend his steps her way. But he sharpened his vision, hoping for a smile.
Nothing.
Unease hardened to fear. What was wrong? He couldn’t have done anything wrong since he hadn’t even seen her since… No, he wasn’t going to speculate. She had a right to her moods, whatever they might be.
He dismounted again a little ways from her. She was on a small ATV and the mare—who was half Shire and big enough to hold even Mach—would tower over her. He closed the last few strides on foot.
“I figured you’d come out this way once you got home, to check my work.” He tried for a smile.
She didn’t smile back. “Home as in Earth?”
Unease to fear to panic. “That’s where we both are right now, yeah,” he said carefully. “Were you somewhere else earlier?” He knew he should try for a teasing tone—but he had to know.
“I was time traveling,” she said flatly.
His hand tightened on the reins, so much tension vibrating down the leather than even through the slack curve the mare felt his dread and stomped again, bobbing her head. “I…didn’t know that was possible.”
“Maybe not. What do you think about aliens?”
His nanites shrank deep into his bones, like a billion Chips and Pickles getting caught rolling in cowpies. “I don’t.”
“Don’t believe in them?”
“Don’t think about them.” That was mostly true. “Not really part of my days. Which are cows, barbed wire, and hay. Or my nights.” He tilted back his hat so he knew she’d see his face. “Which is you.”
In the cold moonlight, her clear blue eyes were more like his: flat, gray.
Empty.
“I don’t believe aliens either,” she said.
Oh, he didn’t like that nuance in her words. “I’d rather believe in flying horses.”
“Are you?”
He frowned. “A flying horse?”
She slammed both palms against the handles, the heavy leather of her gloves making a sharp slapping sound. “An alien.”
She’d asked, point blank. He couldn’t lie. Not to his queen. Every part of him, synthetic and organic, ached as if he were being torn at the molecular level. If he lied, she could know—that was clear—and she would never forgive him. If he told the truth…she would know and she could never forget what he was: a killer not of her world, a monster invading her planet and her bed.
Caught between the demand to be truthful with her and the baseline coding that required him to defend his keyholder—even from herself, even if she wasn’t his keyholder yet—he stared at her. “Why would you ask me this?”
She huffed out a harsh breath. “You are an alien. I thought…” Shaking her head hard, she jolted out another breath, a hoarse laugh. “One of your kind told me everything.”
“Mach would never—”
“Not him. The bigger, meaner one.”
Delta almost staggered at the revelation. “Cosmo was here? He spoke to you?”
“Is he your other brother?” She held up one hand when he started to answer. “Never mind. Don’t care. Why are you here?”
“We mean no harm. We crash landed—”
“He told me that.” She glared at him. “Why are you here?”
His muscles clenched with the urge to go to her, to take her in his arms and soothe away the fury and anguish that churned on her face. To put light back into the flatness of her stare. “I’m missing some cows,” he reminded her. “And more than that, I missed you.”
His attempt at levity didn’t do a thing. A new emotion cracked through the roiling furor in her expression: confusion. In a wavering voice, she said, “What am I supposed to do now, now that I know what you are?”
He went to his knees before her, downed by the entreaty in her tone. He had never, ever meant to take away her assurance—in herself, her world, her choices. A queen without confidence was…doomed to fall from her throne.
And he’d done that to her with his lies.
No, worse than that. He’d broken her with what he was. She’d never be able to look at other humans or the vast sky above without wondering what she was missing, without knowing that she was trapped on a tiny, nowhere world at the mercy of a vast, cruel universe.
The wondering and the knowledge was what made a CWBOI matrix so valuable for those beings that could afford to be the cruelty in the universe.
With the melting snow and mud soaking into his jeans, he stared up at her. “Don’t do anything,” he begged. “Pretend this was a dream. It never happened. Ride away and don’t look back.”
She gazed down at him, and for a heartbeat, he thought he saw a glimmer of light in her eyes. A chance, maybe? His heartbeat stuttered. Or just a teardrop catching moonlight.
“That’s what your brother said. That I had to set you free or I’d lose everything.” She lifted her chin, still watching him. “Why does he think I own you?”
So Cosmo hadn’t told her everything. Delta swore to himself. Just the parts that damned him.
He breathed out. Not a curse, but a wish. “Because I’d give myself to you, if you’d have me.”
Her hands slipped off the ATV controls, curling into her lap. “We had each other. Twice.”
If she could say that… Sharper than barbed wire, a sliver of hope pierced him. “There’s a part of me—my code—that needs to belong to someone. It’s like…an open wound that never stops bleeding.” He shook his head. “No, that’s not quite right. When a wolf cries at night, sometimes there’s no answer. It feels like that.”
She let out a short breath, not quite a sob, that curled in the cold air. “Delta, everyone feels like that.”
Did she? The thought she might feel as he did wrapped around him tighter than all the strands of barbed wire encircling the Fallen A. Did the barbs mark a boundary, keep him safe…or trap him, slice him all the way to the bone?
How could he wish that on her?
Slowly, he pushed himself to his boots, careful not to advance on her even as he reeled from the irresistible urge to get closer. “I’m sorry, Lindy. I didn’t mean to hurt you, or scare you. I shouldn’t have forced you to save me.”
“Save you from—?” Another glint in her eye warned him a split second before a kaleidoscope of lights suddenly blazed above them, dropping toward the ground.
He was already in motion, leaping toward his horse.
The underbelly of the ship was fully illuminated, completely unnecessary for flight or orienting, meant only to cause confusion and terror on a low-tech world. Which as a shroud he could appreciate.
Lindy was staring upward, her jaw cranked to one side—but at least it wasn’t hanging open. “—What?” she finished her question.
“Lindy, go!” He spun the mare back on her heels, jolting a startled whinny from her. She’d been watching the sky with as much consternation as Lindy.
The roar of the igniting ATV told him Lindy understood the danger—or at least wasn’t willing to stick around to find out if he was wrong.
They sped down the hill, back the way he came, angling toward the fence. He wasn’t sure how he was going to get them through the barbed wire and back to the Fallen A before their tormentors caught them.
At the moment, it seemed the ship was toying with them. The scintillating lights blazed off the patches of snow on the ground and sent shadows whirling, making the path a deadly course of obstacles and illusion.
But Lindy surged ahead of him on her ATV, fearless and obviously in full control of the familiar vehicle. And his mare was an experienced cow horse. Maybe Lindy planned to ram the gate—seemed like something she might do, he thought proudly.
The beings on the ship apparently sensed her resolve as well, because they suddenly burst ahead in a roaring wash of unseasonal heat; the ship was still burning hot from its entry through the atmosphere.
Delta ran lines of attack in his head. He and Lindy weren’t going to make it. Driving his heels into the mare’s sides, he put on a burst of speed that brought them parallel with Lindy just as the gunner on the ship lost patience with their flight—or wasn’t entertained enough by their lack of panic—and opened fire.
The wide, diffuse beam of orange light surrounded them. It tingled on his skin, barely stronger than midday sunlight, but Lindy’s ATV coughed once and died. The abrupt loss of momentum threw her forward over the handlebars.
Delta bent from the saddle and scooped her up under his arm before she could settle back in the seat of the disabled ATV. These intruders knew nothing if they thought a standard electromagnetic pulse would stop a shroud. His organic shell counteracted the immobilizing pulse.
For a second, he wrestled with Lindy’s weight. Not that he couldn’t hold her, but the awkward swing left the mare unbalanced. She grunted and Lindy gasped before she wrapped her arm around his waist and swung herself into the saddle behind him.
Their hips snuggled close together, rocking in time as the mare found her stride again and stretched out at his urging heels.
Lindy wrapped her arms tight around him and leaned in close, making them as much one body as she could to ease the mare’s burden. “Friends of yours?”
“No.” A ship exposing itself on a closed world like Earth was breaking as many transgalactic laws as the criminal consortium that built CWBOIs. Whoever this was, he wanted no part of them.
He guided the mare toward the pine trees. Of course the ship’s sensors wouldn’t be too confused by a bit of greenery, even if they weren’t yet fully calibrated to Earth parameters, but his own passive nanite shielding might throw enough of a ghost to mess with their aim.
If he ditched the mare and Lindy he could disappear, no problem. And no way was that going to happen.
Except… These invaders weren’t interested in abducting livestock or Earther girls. They were here for him.
“Take the reins,” he told Lindy. “When we break from the trees, I’m going to jump off, and then you ride back to your place. I’ll make sure the ship follows me.”
“No.” Her arms tightened around him. “I’m not leaving you here in the middle of nowhere. And I won’t risk leading that ship back to the ranch. The girls are there, and I’m responsible for them.”
Of course a true queen would sacrifice herself, not her people.
He didn’t have time for nobility, and if he didn’t come up with a plan, they were all going to be the sacrifice.
“They don’t want you,” he said, his voice rising in frustration. “They’re after me. You’ll be fine. Just—”
“No!” Her arms snaked up both sides of his chest to lock around his shoulders, and even with his implanted strength, he knew he’d have trouble escaping her clutches without hurting her or knocking her off the horse along with him. “Find another way.”
He was not the strategist or the decider of the matrix. He’d only ever been marked as the sacrifice for the mission; it was his only reason for existing. And now she was preventing that, when she was his mission.
He wanted to be mad at her. Instead he felt peace, cool and sweet as the Strix Springs fountainhead, as the dangling, unfinished ends of his code found their purpose.
She might not want him, and he might be a cyborg, enslaved to kill, but the part of his heart that was his was free to give where he so desired.
“I’m going to blow my nanites,” he told her, mostly musing aloud as it would mean nothing to her. “It’ll be a decoy for the ship to follow. But I’ll lose…most of what I am.” He glanced over his shoulder at her, trusting the mare to keep running, needing to see those clear blue eyes once more. “If you can’t hold me—”
“You’re not that big,” she snarled. “I can hold you.”
That she’d even try, despite the threat from above, proved to him that he’d chosen his keyholder well.
“Hold your breath too,” he warned.
He evicted his nanites in a vaporous cloud. Individually, they were molecular, but all together they made a Delta-sized phantom that peeled away from him like a shed skin.
Or more like a discarded soul.
He slumped in the saddle, wilting to one side as his implants and organics protested the sudden removal of their primary energy and struggled to reengage on their own. His heart beat sluggishly, blood pooling in his extremities.
Lindy held him in one arm, the reins wrapped around her other fist as she kicked the mare into a hard gallop, twisting between the pines at an angle away from the nanite ghost. The trees were tight and the duff slippery, and though the mare was an agile, twisting cow herder in her own right, Delta knew she would’ve faltered in the dangerous darkness if not for the infusion of yurk nanites. He could only hope the small inclusion in her big body would go unnoticed.
Slack in Lindy’s grip, he stared back where beams of hard light stabbed through the dark green needles, shining on the silvery cloud he’d left behind. The invading ship had found its shroud.
They’d discover soon enough that it was only a shroud’s shroud. Without him, the nanites would go dormant and then expire. And without them, he would…
His eyes rolled into the back of his head and he died.