Big Bang: Cyborg Cowboys of Carbon County #2: Intergalactic Dating Agency Read online

  Table of Contents

  Big Bang

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  About the Author

  Romancing the Alien

  Thank You!

  BIG BANG

  CYBORG COWBOYS OF CARBON COUNTY

  INTERGALACTIC DATING AGENCY

  Elsa Jade

  WEBSITE | NEW RELEASE ALERT | FACEBOOK

  It’s Christmas in Carbon County, and not a creature is stirring, not even a cyborg…

  He was never meant to be awakened. In the matrix of genetically and cybernetically enhanced contract killers, he was the Omega—brought out only the last resort, the final answer, the end times. But crash-landing on the planet Dirt made Cosmo just another cowboy, albeit one with a time bomb in his massive body forever set to 00:00:00:01.

  Victoria Ray thought she was so smart. As a reformed black-hat hacker, she cracked every code ever put in front of her. Except the one that explains people. But then she found out about aliens. Turns out, though, Cosmo Halley is worse than any people. At least she doesn’t have to be nice to a killer robot to get what she wants: Off this world.

  But when an old enemy and a new one join forces to expose the CWBOIs on Earth, Cosmo and Vic will have to figure out what it means to love before everything they know is lost forever. Can the Spirit of Christmas—peace, goodwill, and spiked eggnog—teach a cyborg and a misanthrope to believe in a future together?

  On the outskirts of the Big Sky Intergalactic Dating Agency, the Cyborg Cowboys of Carbon County are rounding up earthly pleasures for their forever mates.

  Read all the Cyborg Cowboys of Carbon County

  MACH ONE

  DELTA V

  BIG BANG

  New to the Big Sky Alien Mail Order Brides? Read ALPHA STAR for free!

  And find all the Intergalactic Dating Agency books at RomancingTheAlien.com

  Copyright © 2018 by Elsa Jade

  Cover design by Croco Designs

  ISBN 978-1-941547-30-4

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as factual. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be scanned, reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.

  Chapter 1

  He would defeat these vicious monsters if it was the last thing he did.

  And as the matrix Omega, the “last thing” he did would be mighty and terrible when the extinction-level event hard-wired into his system obliterated everything that opposed him.

  Perhaps that was an extreme measure, but if the barn felines would just let themselves be petted, he wouldn’t have to contemplate such a catastrophic cataclysm.

  See? Even in their nomenclature, cats were little assholes.

  Just like him.

  Moving at a glacial pace that reflected both his extreme dimensions and emotional coldness, he crept across the yard at the Strix Springs Ranch toward the lounging cats. Taking a hiatus from their nighttime murderousness (which he quite appreciated) they were napping on the haybales stacked in the barn doorway. In the wan winter sunlight that bathed the Montana valley, their multi-colored coats shone like the metallic decorations called tinsel spooled around the upper railing of the corral and made his fingers twitch with longing.

  Lun-mei, his Alpha’s keyholder and the veterinarian of Carbon County, had told him all about them. “Twix is the orange one. KitKat is the brown-and-white striped tabby. Snickers is the black-and-white tuxedo,” she’d said, before she frowned. “Why do you want to know?”

  “I wish to be their friend.”

  “They’re barn cats,” she explained. “If they wanted to be friends, they’d be pets.”

  “Yes, exactly.” He frowned back at her. “If I pet them, they will be friends.”

  She shook her head. “That’s…not how cats work.”

  Of course he ignored her. She might be a veterinarian with advanced training in all types of local fauna, but she hadn’t even known aliens existed before his Alpha, Mach, had imprinted on her, so how much credit should they give her, really? Also, it wasn’t fair to think that just because something looked lazy, didn’t know how to live indoors, and was occasionally murderous meant that it didn’t want to be friends.

  So he crept closer. Since KitKat was nearest, he had the best chance with her. Her brown and white fur was rich and soft looking, the stripes barely riffling in the December wind that found its way around the big red barn. She was fat and her eyes were closed. He was a genetically and cybernetically enhanced predatory shroud; certainly he could touch her before she awoke.

  Even as he thought it, she cracked one yellow eye, her stare piercing him from across the yard. Huh. Lun-mei had not mentioned that Earther felines were telepathic, but KitKat gave every indication that she knew what he was thinking. Perhaps one of the other cats would make a more suitable victim. Er, pet.

  He shifted his focus towards Snickers.

  As one, all three felines rose and stretched in identical tantalizing arcs. Ooh, if he could just run his hand over their little backs… His earlier research with the barn cats at the Fallen A Ranch indicated that he should not attempt to caress their bellies.

  With dismissive flicks of their tails, they split ranks and slunk around both sides of the barn, leaving him bereft.

  He straightened with a sigh. Maybe next time…

  Wait, one cat remained. He hadn’t noticed her because unlike the other sun-lounging creatures, she had tucked herself against a recessed hay bale where her black and orange coat became one with the shadowed straw.

  Both her eyes seemed to be closed, but he could see the narrow slits of acid green as she watched him. But she hadn’t run away like the others. She was a good cat.

  With a smile that had tricked the Fallen A ranch dogs into believing that he always carried chunks of hotdog, he approached the fourth cat at an oblique, cycloid trajectory.

  “I come in peace,” he assured her softly. “You are very, very furry and I think we might be friends.”

  He extended his hand slowly, and even through the shadows, his nanites detected the luxurious warmth of her small body. The microscopic robots that coursed through him, skin and bones and implants, tingled with the anticipated sensation of her plush fur.

  Such anticipation that his exquisitely tuned technology couldn’t quite believe the blinding pain when the cat sank her fangs and the claws of all four feet into the meat of his palm. She kicked twice, viciously, with her back legs to shred his wrist and then sprang away, so fast even his enhanced tracking system almost couldn’t follow.

  She scaled the hay bales and was in the loft before the first gray drop of his blood sank into the frozen ground.

  He looked up at her as more blood welled, his nanites pushing out any damaged cells or chance of infection. She hissed at him once, her white fangs flashing in the darkness, before she too disappeared.

>   “There’s a fourth cat,” Lun-mei had told him, he remembered now. “You probably won’t see her much. She’s a rather skittish tortie. Her name is Wog.”

  He’d puzzled over that for a moment, scanning his databanks. “I find no record of a candy bar called Wog,” he reported.

  Lun-mei had laughed. “Nothing sweet about Wog.”

  The laughter echoed in his head and he scowled, pivoting away from the barn.

  Only to realize the laughter was real, coming from an Earther female who had sneaked up on him while he was sneaking up on the cats. His distraction and defeat would’ve been embarrassing if she’d known he was a lethal killing machine.

  “I thought everybody knew not to tempt the wrath of God,” she said.

  “I wasn’t tempting,” he said. “I was attempting.” He paused. “What is the wrath of God?”

  She gestured behind him. “Wog. Wrath of God. The cat? I was told to stay away from her.” She looked at his shredded hand. “I guess you didn’t get the message. Until now.”

  With a grunt, he gave his hand a flick, settling the nanites into the puncture wounds so he’d stop bleeding. “Who are you?”

  “Vic Ray. I’m the software engineer.” She tilted her head. “You must be Cosmo, the matrix Omega. I was also told to stay away from you.”

  She knew what he was? That was unacceptable.

  The Earther was not as small as Lun-mei, nor as substantial as Lindy Minervudottir, keyholder of the matrix’s only surviving Delta. This one was…middling. Middle height, middle weight, middle brown skin tone, mid-length hair of a mid-dark brown hue sticking out in waves from under a…horrifically ugly hat.

  The hat was also brown, knit of some heavy natural fiber, but it was decorated with two white circles each with a black circle within arranged to resemble sclera and pupils. It also had pressed fabric in a darker brown branching away from the skull like horns. Plus a bulbous red dot in the middle of her forehead. Apparently she was indicating that she had killed some powerful beast and mounted its head in effigy upon her own.

  Perhaps he would do the same with Wog.

  When he said nothing in answer to her supposition, just stared at her, she tilted her head and that ugly hat the other direction. “Is there something on Rudolph’s nose?” She lifted her hand to press the red button.

  It began to play terrible sounds. A recording of the beast’s slaughter? Or maybe just Earther music.

  He jerked back. “Why?”

  She grinned and said, loud enough to be heard over the song, “Horrible, right? It’s a disguise for my inner humbug.”

  “You have bugs?” He stared down at her.

  “Not actual… C’mon. You’ve been on this planet long enough to get Christmas.”

  “I have not gotten Christmas,” he said stiffly. “Or your Earther bugs.”

  When she crossed her arms, her puffy silver jacket compressed, forcing him to reevaluate her size. She had sneaked up on him, and now she was changing shape. All sorts of…curves were hinted at: the hyperbolic nip of her waist flaring to the atriphtothlassic curve of her hips underneath and the scaled hyperbolic cosines of her breasts above.

  He’d have to manually trace the catenary of each breast as well as her backside minus the coat to authenticate his equations or he’d have to admit he was just guessing. And he did not like this feeling of imbalance.

  There was a reason Omegas were activated only at the inevitable end of an impossible mission.

  “You seem like a lost cause,” she said, as if she—like the cats—could read his thoughts. “But there’s still hope for your friends, so let’s get this party started.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Shrouds don’t party.”

  “Riiiight. Did they tell you why you’re here?”

  With a shrug, he headed toward the house. “My Alpha said come. I came.”

  The scuffle of her steps behind him scraped on his internal warning sensors worse than her screeching hat. She wasn’t properly outfitted for the Montana winter, in that silver coat and lightweight canvas footwear. Why was she here? Why was she following him?

  He wouldn’t ask her.

  If someone called for an Omega, whatever the reason—it wasn’t good.

  ***

  Victoria Ray had thought Bozeman was the ass-end of nowhere, but Diamond Valley Depot, one of the smallest towns in Carbon County, was, like, a mosquito bite on the ass-end of nowhere.

  Although it was too frickin cold for mosquitoes at the moment.

  And she wasn’t even in town. These two neighboring ranches—the Fallen A and Strix Springs—were a bumpy truck ride away from town, so far out that her phone was basically a useless brick in her pocket. Worse than a brick; at least a brick had a use. If not for Lun-mei and Lindy giving her rides, she’d be stuck out here.

  And she so very desperately needed to get unstuck and far, far away from here.

  She trailed the gigantic alien cyborg toward the tidy little ranch house but paused when the Omega stopped on the porch to bang snow off his boots. The force of the blows made the red and silver ornaments shiver where they were tucked in the swags of evergreen boughs looped around the railing. There was no extra truck in the yard, and judging from the white stuff clumped into the lugs of his soles, he’d walked here from…somewhere. She glanced over her shoulder.

  Yeah, still nothing out there but snow, pine trees, straw stubble, cows, and just enough holiday décor to be very sad.

  So where had he come from? In the time she’d been exiled to Montana, she’d seen plenty of loner survivalist types, but Cosmo was in a legion of his own.

  Except this robot disguised as a drifter had been trying—with a really impressive lack of success—to pet the killer kitty in the barn.

  She glanced at his big hand where the nasty scratches had faded to silver scars already, although the pale circuitry marks were obvious on his darker skin. Courtesy of the nanites, she knew, that powered his various implants and gave him extra speed, strength, and (allegedly) smarts.

  The scariness was all him, from those really big boots to the icy blue eyes that seemed to stare right through her.

  Mach and Delta—the Custom War Bionic/Organic Impersons she’d already met—didn’t come off as scary. Huge, quiet, and watchful in a way she didn’t relate to at all, but not scary.

  She probably shouldn’t have laughed at the Omega. But nothing made her more snarky and dumb than being scared.

  Reluctantly, she edged up the porch steps, giving her sneakers a cursory thump against the last riser. The hollow bang reverberated through her toes, and she winced at the reminder that she didn’t belong here.

  Which was why she had to get off this planet.

  If she hadn’t been right behind Cosmo, he would’ve let the holly wreath on the door slam in her face. She scowled at the back of his big head. Sure, she’d been rude, but weren’t cowboys supposed to be honorable gentlemen?

  Of course, he was a killer robot, so…

  Half and half, really, she mused as she watched him shrug out of his bulky jacket and hang it on the rack beside the door. But apparently with Omegas, the robot part was dominant. Maybe that explained the…

  She lost track of the thought as she realized the bulky part was all him. Mach and Delta were clearly machines built for war: big, blunt, utilitarian, but with the kind of engineered beauty where form followed function.

  Cosmo looked like a bookend. And not a cutesy one either. Just something squat and dense, that all the knowledge and poetry in the world couldn’t knock over.

  And where Mach and Delta could at least pass for big, burly, taciturn ranchers, blurring the nanite pathways under their skin, Cosmo seemed to have no such subterfuge. Under the cursory camouflage of the heavy canvas coat and denim, he was wearing only a sleeveless black jerkin, too thin for the cold outside. The circuitry markings burned across his swarthy skin, even over his skull visible through the close-shaved stubble of pale hair, like the molten flux she used when she
’d learned to solder circuit boards. And while the ice blue of his eyes was striking enough, thick silver rings around his pupils expanded and contracted in uncanny mechanical twists.

  No way would anyone ever see him as anything but an alien machine.

  He turned abruptly and caught her staring. “So tell me.”

  “What?” She hated the nervous little hitch her voice. It made her sound breathless and weak compared to the deep timbre of his Marvin-Gaye-auto-tuned-to-an-uncanny-valley-of-sexiness rumble. “Tell you what?”

  “Why are you here?” That basso growl got even deeper. “And why am I?”

  “Your Alpha wants to deprogram you.”

  Cosmo stiffened. “The best way is to shoot me. Repeatedly. Until I’m incapacitated. And then set me on fire. And scatter the ashes far apart so the nanites can’t—”

  “Not deactivate you. Just change your code,” she interrupted. “So you can’t be hijacked by a keyholder. That’s it.” When he only stared at her, she clarified, “Mach does not want to deactivate you, any of you. He’s trying to save you.”

  The Omega kept staring at her for a long, silent moment, those silver rings around his pupils twisting restlessly—sheesh, he’d been more trusting of wicked Wog—then walked onward toward the kitchen.

  Vic hustled to catch up, her wet sneakers squeaking on the linoleum. While she’d originally been contacted by Mach and Lun-mei a couple of months ago, she’d been staying at the Strix Springs Ranch with Lindy and Delta while she set up her studio and ran her initial simulations. Though she’d spent most of her hours hunkered down at her terminals—which, honestly, was most of her life—she’d had a chance to get to know the couples a little. But they worked almost as much as she did, ranching and vetting and new-babying.

  In the kitchen, she dredged up a smile for Delta who was rocking the two-month-old in a bassinet while he scribbled on small scraps of paper.

  Admittedly, Stella was adorable, as babies went, with her wide cheeks and thick black hair and a pair of fathomless dark eyes dominating all her other features. But it was unnervingly weird to know the baby had been “hatched” from an alien fetus based on the same model as Delta himself but inoculated with the DNA of two Earth mothers—Lindy and her wife, who’d passed away five years ago.