Was he as programmed as a mercenary cyborg?
The empty blue-gray corridor was like a blank fog around him as Eril strode on autopilot toward engineering. The underwriters had told him how vital this assignment was. They repeated the mantra on the rare occasions he could actually make contact. But they hadn’t needed to: he knew, better than anyone, how hostile forces with an intent to dominate were perfectly willing to destroy the very thing they allegedly wanted. This unknown entity would stop at nothing to control the sheerways.
And he would stop at nothing to stop it.
He went to engineering and found Fariz. The wiry engineer was already up to his elbows in drone parts. “I’m here to help,” he said.
He only wished he was absolutely certain that his “helping” wasn’t worse than their enemies.
Working together, they prepped the drone for its suicide flight and were done within the half hour. Fariz messaged the captain. “All we need is the signaling device,” he said.
“On its way,” the captain replied. He patched through an image of a tethered figure wedged alongside the damaged thruster. Against the bright, raw edges of twisted metal, Shaxi’s smooth, dark curves looked particularly beautiful—and breathtakingly fragile.
Eril’s breath caught in his throat as if the wind that whipped her short hair into a platinum corona had stolen the oxygen from his lungs.
He stabbed his finger at the comm. “You sent her out there while we’re still in flight?!”
The captain’s voice was calm, with more than a hint of reprimand. “Her idea. We don’t have the luxury of setting down, and she was concerned the device might be sensitive to a remote extraction unit.”
When he gritted his teeth, Eril could almost taste the sand fogging the open air around her. He slammed out of engineering as much as he could slam the smooth door and hurried to the lower deck. But Shaxi and Jorr were already returning, Jorr tossing a fist-sized tracker in his hand.
“Get that to Fariz without breaking it,” Eril snapped at him.
Jorr rolled his eyes. “We’re going to augur it into a canyon. A few more bumps won’t hurt.”
Eril couldn’t show the fear that had shot through him, seeing Shaxi straining against the wind on the outside of the ship, but anger was an acceptable substitute. He lowered his chin and stared at Jorr. “The same can’t be said for you.”
Jorr lifted his lip in a sneer. “Said the man who didn’t even bring a knife to the plasma fight.”
Shaxi coughed, a harsh sound, and spiked her fingers through her hair. Dust puffed up around her, and the astringent stink of scorched metal wafted toward him. “The engineer is waiting,” she reminded them curtly. “We need to launch that drone.”
Jorr gave her a respectful half-salute and strode ahead of them after one last hard stare at Eril.
Shaxi gave him a slitted glare of her own. “What in any hells was that about?”
He paced alongside her so he didn’t have to meet her eyes. “You almost sound like the captain now.”
“You were the one giving orders just a second ago.”
“I can’t believe you were out in an open thruster.”
“It wasn’t operational. And someone needed to retrieve the tracking device.”
“That’s why we have robots,” he snapped.
“I’m a robot,” she snapped back.
He swallowed his fury. “You’re more than that.”
“Half more than that.” Her voice dripped sarcasm.
Being with this crew was making her more a real girl every day, he thought wryly. He managed not to say it aloud.
“You can’t get sucked out of the ship,” he said instead. “We need you.”
After a moment, she nodded, although the gesture was tentative and jerky, as if she didn’t quite believe him.
“First stop, med bay,” he said.
To his surprise, she followed him without another question, but she looked around when they entered. “Do we need to recalibrate another scanner?”
“This time we need to fix you,” he said.
She stared at him warily. “I’m not broken. Not that way.”
He gestured, taking in the length of her body. “You ripped your nice new uniform there and there, and you have a bad case of road rash.”
She peered down. “There are no roads out here.”
“Find the reference yourself.” He rummaged through several drawers to gather the materials he needed. “Hop up on the exam table.”
She gave a scornful sniff. “I’m not going to faint.”
“Gives me better access.”
After a moment, she acquiesced. “Give me the skin sealant.”
“I’ll do it.”
She scowled. “I can—”
“I see how good a job you did on your own. When you blush, the scars show.”
“I don’t blush,” she said. “And even if I did, you can’t see the blood in my skin.”
But the subtle glow to her cheeks told her lie, and the faint white lines of old injuries made him the honest one this time.
“Blushing,” he noted.
She touched her fingertips to her face, and he took the opportunity to slice off the sleeve of her uniform.
“What are you—?” When she lowered her hands to ward him off, he slipped off the detached sleeve.
“It was ruined anyway,” he said.
She’d obviously twisted through the torn metal and caught herself in a couple places. The wound across her upper arm sliced through the dermis and into muscle, but she didn’t twitch as he probed for fragments.
Keeping his tone noncommittal, he asked, “Did Hermitaj use nanotech on its people? Am I going to find anything in here that will fight back?”
She shook her head. “Nano was deemed too destabilizing.”
He grunted. “I’m surprised. If anyone was going to break convention on nanotech in humans, it’d be Hermitaj.”
“They tried, but whenever they integrated nano, it tried to counteract their other programming.”
“The nano wanted to make you fully human again? I’m not sure if that’s ironic or terrible.” He flushed the wound, catching the overflow of decontaminant fluid in a towel, and added an inner layer of sealant. “Let that sit a moment while I look at your leg.”
She eyed him. “Are you going to rip off my pants too?”
As inappropriate and unnecessary and out-of-nowhere as the question was, his body responded. His muscles tightened, and if the med scanners had been focused on him, he had no doubt it would’ve shown his temperature spiking by several degrees.
She was half machine, he reminded himself. But then, he was all monster.
“Lie down,” he said. His voice was lower than he’d intended, and rougher.
She reclined to one side, angling her hip toward him where her legging was torn over her thigh, below the curve of her hipbone.
With deliberate care, making sure his hands did not tremble, he snipped the tear wider, exposing more of her dark skin. Blood streaked her like some subtle, fierce tattoo, completely unacceptable on any civilized planet.
But they weren’t at that nice, clean place, wherever that was.
He cleared his throat before he spoke this time. “It doesn’t look too bad.”
“Missed all the ugly parts,” she said. “The cyber-embeds are deeper.”
“It wouldn’t be ugly,” he said. “Hermitaj was famed for its elegant tech.”
She fingered the ragged tear of cloth. “I wouldn’t know. I never look at it.”
In her pensive eyes, the gold rings of her implants were all but invisible. He realized her irises weren’t truly black but deepest brown like the vines of her favorite berries. But unlike the pixberries, all her thorns seemed to be stripped away.
Her vulnerability left him feeling as if he was the one about to be sucked out into the void. He tried to make his voice stern. “If you don’t take care of yourself—”
“The plysteel is self-repairing. It takes care of itself.”
“And if it doesn’t, or can’t?”
Her jaw clenched, but she said nothing.
He flattened his palm on her hip. “Then I guess it’s a good thing I’m here.”
He was close enough to mark the flicker in her dark eyes, some shiver of awareness that brightened them from within.
“Do it, then,” she said softly.
This time his hand did shake almost imperceptibly as he reached for the disinfecting fluid.
“You’re going to get me wet,” she said. “Here. Let me…” She kicked off her boots and peeled out of the leggings, giving him a flash of the curvature of her ass cupped by the fitted layer of her basewear before she lounged back again.
Except this time, her long legs were completely bare.
She had a warrior’s body, of course. He’d already noticed that. While artificial physical enhancements of all sorts made humankind faster and stronger, younger looking and more attractive, and even longer lived, form still tended to follow function. Unless consciously manipulated, the humanoid figure more often than not reflected what it was asked to do.
And Shaxi had the scars to prove it.
But for all that, and her implants as well, she was still so much woman that his breath stopped. Lounging in front of him, she reminded him of one of the goddesses from the Old Earth myths she’d mentioned. The tactical black of her skin was meant to be impervious and intimidating, but to his surprise, it was smooth and yielding to his touch, like pixberry flesh. Not abhorrent, but enticing. He wanted to take a bite.
In his head he still knew what she was, but his body said the rest of the universe could have their elegant, sensual l’auraly; this innocent killer was his.
Eril exhaled in a slow, silent hiss to focus himself. He made his touch as light and impersonal as possible while he rinsed the wound. Still, he managed to get decontam fluid everywhere. Just as well she’d stripped down, even though the long, lush power of her legs in his peripheral vision was wreaking havoc on his concentration. He poured more of the sealant into the wound than was probably necessary, wishing the sticky gel could block bad thoughts.
Because his thoughts were very bad.
“Why did you snap at Jorr when we came in with the device?” Her voice was low, curious.
Distracted as he was by her skin, he answered honestly. “Because I was mad at you for risking your life out there. We need you. The sheerways need you.”
“Then why didn’t you yell at me?”
He raised his gaze with a wry smile. “Because you’d probably crush me.”
She looked thoughtful. “I wouldn’t. Not over that at least.”
He stilled, uncertain, but she slanted him a sly glance and he let out a short laugh at her teasing. “Good to know.”
“Still,” she went on, as if he hadn’t interrupted, “it’s probably best to stay out of my way. My coding is unreliable since Hermitaj went down, and I wouldn’t want to do anything unfortunate.”
Her coding. The reason he’d schemed to get her on board. She wasn’t some refugee waif; she was a killing tool that someone else had lost and he had found.
The reminder that he was as untrustworthy as her code curdled his amusement. Leaving the wound in her thigh for a moment, he injected another layer of sealant over the jagged slice in her shoulder and eased the edges of the cut together. Painfully conscious of the power even in her resting form, he kept his tone casual. “How bad is the decay rate?”
She started to shrug then stopped herself when he made a cautioning sound and tightened his grip on her arm. “I’ve been able to delete or patch all subroutines that might have caused a critical systems failure. Since on’Taj units were strike forces, we had more autonomy than some other units, less programming that was reliant on real-time updates from Hermitaj. But even for me, there are still…” She laid her hand over his, fingering the flexible gel closing the wound. “It’s hard to explain. There are edges inside that will never fit back together.”
He looked down at the place they touched. Against his bigger hands, her dark fingers looked slender, almost delicate. Part of him wanted to pull away, sickened at the thing she had been made into and his intent to use her again, but he knew he was speaking the truth when he said, “You need a new connection.”
“Maybe I do.”
A huskiness in her usually brisk voice made him raise his gaze. In her lounging position—one arm propping up her head, the other touching his hand—her body made a sine wave of rising and falling curves, each one equally perfect yet more seductive than the last. She watched him, her black eyes half lidded, the gold iris rings invisible. He tensed, frozen as if the sealant had bound them together but excruciatingly aware of the heat of her skin, of his own body.
He pulled his hands out from under hers. “Let’s get this finished up.”
He added a second layer of gel to the slash across her hip and molded the wound closed. He tried to force himself to mentally review what he knew of neural rewiring and biotech interfaces, but the sensation of his hands full of her flesh blanked every coherent thought.
The dense, supple flex of her muscles tempted him to sink his fingers deeper, to test her strength against his own. Under the traceries of old scars that made a faint, pale map on her darkness, the fine satin of her skin tempted him again. As if nothing had ever touched her except bloody violence…and now him.
He’d only wanted another excuse to scan her systems, to find a vulnerability he could exploit. Instead, she’d revealed a weakness in him.
Every instinct warned him to get away. He’d been here before, when he was young and stupid, drawn to an exotic beauty who’d used him for her own foul purposes. Thanks to the destruction of Hermitaj, he knew Shaxi had no purpose beyond her own survival—he was the one with the sinister plan—but still the parallels spooked him. That long-ago terrible choice, made in all innocence, had set him irrevocably on the bitter path where he found himself now. How much worse would it be this time, tangled in ugly knowledge as he was?
His muscles tightened with the need to push her away. He’d at least have told her to hold the wound closed herself, but the angle would’ve been awkward and now she was washing her face and hands with the decontam fluid. So he kept his grip clamped around her thigh, the fingertips of one hand brushing intimately close to the mound of her pubis. He gritted his teeth against the urge to run from her.
Or get much, much closer.
Instead he was forced to just stand and endure the conflicted ache in his muscles while she leisurely wiped herself down. Each swipe had the fastidiousness of the genetically modified kitters sent along with every terraforming operation to deal with the inevitable vermin.
She finished her impromptu bath and wadded the towel between her hands before slanting a look at him. “I don’t have all my memories, but I know it’s been a long time since anyone noticed if I lived or not. Why do you care so much?”
As wrong as it was—he worked alone; he always had—he wanted her to understand him. “For the same reason you do your job, in a way: because that’s the way I was raised.”
“I wasn’t raised. I was programmed.”
He lifted one shoulder. “You told me we never escape the paths we are set upon. My parents were followers of Tranquility and lived on one of the collective worlds organized around those teachings. When I was just a little younger than the twins, two of my parents were killed during the Alignment Wars by an extremist organization.” Despite his best efforts, his lips twisted in old fury. “The extremists insisted Tranquility worlds couldn’t be unaffiliated, and they coerced governing councils on pain of death. My second father who was on the council refused to give in. Until my mother and first father were taken hostage.”
More debilitating than the fury was the guilt, and corrosive memories choked off his words. The look on his father’s face when he realized how the extremists had gotten through the house security had flayed a chunk of his soul. Even before his first father had hounded him out of their defiled home, driving him into the underwriters’ impersonally objective employ, he’d known there was nothing he could ever do to redeem himself.
He shook his head, though the memories clung like cold-burning plasma that had eaten away any hope of who he might have been and left only the brittle, bitter bones of a walking dead man. “If the sheerways are controlled by a sole force, every world would be held hostage. I won’t—I can’t let that happen again, anywhere, to anyone.”
Slowly, she pushed herself upright, dislodging his hands, which he realized numbly had tightened in his anguish. She swung her bare legs to hang down from the table, and he stared at the blanched marks on her dark skin. He wanted to howl in disgust at himself, then and now. He swiped the back of one hand across his mouth to smother the ugly sound.
“I am an abomination to you,” she murmured.
He snapped his head up, a flush of shock incinerating the lingering chill in his body. “What? No!”
“Tranquility believes in unenhanced humanism and the principle of free will. Of which I exist in clear violation.”
“My parents were Tranquilists, not me.” Their peaceful way of life had been lost to him. Worse than lost. He’d been the tool of its annihilation when he’d recklessly confused lust with idealism and gave a beautiful terrorist the key to everything that mattered.
Shaxi braced her hands on the edge of the table, her mouth twisted, though whether in pain from her wounds or something else, he wasn’t sure. “You agreed that we are set in our programming. And if that is how they raised you, you can’t change.”
He stared past her, unable to meet her black eyes. He hadn’t been brought up to be an assassin either, but one brutal night of blood had washed away all the loving years before.
The irony of becoming what he hated was not lost on him.
“My way wasn’t Tranquility, not after what happened,” he told her. “I exist to preserve freedom along the sheerways, whatever the cost.”
“Even if the cost is working with a being like me.”
He had done—would do—far, far worse. He would even make her part of his own hell to ensure the greater good. But he couldn’t afford to let her know that part.
He locked gazes with her, letting her see in his eyes what truth was his to tell. “You think I’d judge you? There is nothing bad you’ve done that I haven’t. And I remember it all.”
She stared at him for a long moment, her eyes flat black. She drew a shallow breath, and to his shock, she reached out to lay her palm against his cheek.
The light touch jolted through him, stronger than the electrical charge he knew she could generate internally. But instead of blowing him backward, the sensation locked his knees, as if he might never step away.
With gentle pressure, she turned his face first one way, then the other as she looked at him. “You have scars,” she murmured. “But they go deeper than what my eyes can see.” Her thumb gently grazed his bottom lip. “Or maybe you are hiding them from yourself.”
“No.” Under the sharp tang of antiseptic and the earthier musk of blood, he breathed a fresher scent: her skin. “I know what I am.”
“And what’s that?”
“A man contemplating the troubles of the universe. And at the moment, I think you might be one of them.”
Her lips curved with a feminine pleasure even more intense than when he’d handed her the pixberry dessert. “I have never been anyone’s trouble before,” she said. “I’ve always been the solution.”
From the beginning, he’d intended for that to be the case. If he was going to make her part of his plan, he needed her trust and willingness. He needed her to be open to his influence and primed for his command.
If he couldn’t access her coding directly, as deeply embedded as those directive systems might be, there were other ways to a woman’s core.
Slowly, knowing that for all the years he’d fought for freedom, taking this liberty might be his last, he leaned forward and kissed her.