Theta Read online

  Table of Contents

  Theta

  The story so far...

  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

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  About the Author

  Romancing the Alien

  Thank You!

  THETA

  CYBORG COWBOYS OF CARBON COUNTY

  INTERGALACTIC DATING AGENCY

  Elsa Jade

  WEBSITE | NEW RELEASE ALERT | FACEBOOK

  The Theta shroud designation was always meant to be an outsider—a spy and saboteur lurking on the fringes of the elite cyborg soldiers. So even as he built a personality out of the dust of Diamond Valley, Montana, Troy Lehigh stayed apart from his brothers while they lived and loved. A Theta could never hope for such a bond.

  His only desire, from the first moment he stole his consciousness from the soulless programming that controlled him, was to destroy the consortium that doomed him to solitude. He would’ve done it too, except his brothers chose love over war and trapped him in their midst.

  But then, a hundred and fifty years ago, he met a sassy soiled dove in a Montana saloon…

  Nell Dearly had wandered too far from home and was struggling to survive. But the long-lost farm girl has no idea just how far out she’ll go…

  The cyborg cowboys of Carbon County have fought for each other, for love, and for Earth itself. But the shroud consortium they escaped never stopped seeking them. Now every star they see from Big Sky Country is in danger, and only a lonely Theta and the saloon girl he kissed once upon a time might save us.

  Read all the Cyborg Cowboys of Carbon County

  MACH ONE

  DELTA V

  BIG BANG

  THETA

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

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

  Copyright © 2019 by Elsa Jade

  Cover design by Croco Designs

  ISBN 978-1-941547-36-6

  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.

  The story so far…

  Some hundred and fifty years ago, an off-course ship crashed on Earth and dumped an elite company of bionic beings into the wilds of Montana. Bred and built for war, the matrix of killer robot-men had been destined to fight for whomever bought their key. But after the crash, their keyholder never found them, and the three surviving shrouds carved out a life for themselves in Big Sky Country.

  These cyborg cowboys rode the range. They pet their dogs and one accidental alien dragon. They kept to themselves as the world slowly changed around them. And eventually, they even fell in love.

  Until scavengers discovered the existence of this unkeyed matrix of invaluable interstellar soldiers.

  The Alpha, Delta, and Omega brothers fought for their new lives and their loves. They ended up fighting their long-lost Theta brother too when he would’ve forced them back into their old ways in order to destroy the consortium that created them and sought to enslave them again.

  But with their brave Earther women beside them, they’ve won every fight they faced—human hearts and synthetic souls side by side. Surely now they can finally live and love in peace under the Big Sky that is their home…

  Chapter 1

  1860 ~ Montana

  The Theta eyed his enemies across the battered battlefield. He would destroy them. A killer cyborg would never be defeated on this primitive planet on a minor spiral arm of an inconsequential galaxy isolated from the civilized intergalactic community.

  With a sly smile, he played his ace.

  The grubby card flicked out of his fingers with a whisper of sound, spinning across the raw oak card table. The startled inhalation from his enemies was softer yet but unmistakable.

  They hadn’t expected to see the ace of hearts.

  Of course they hadn’t. Because until just a bit earlier in the evening, the card had been up the finely tailored sleeve of the nattily attired gentleman across from him.

  Troy Lehigh—he’d had other names, but he kept gravitating to this one—tipped back his crumple-brimmed hat and guffawed. “Did ah win?” He made his vowels almost as wide as his belt buckle and his eyes wider yet.

  All three Earther males across from him narrowed their glares, the gazes of the flanking ones slanting inward toward their leader. Who finally smiled back, thinly. “Well, partner, I’d say you did. What a lucky day for you.”

  “Night, you mean,” Troy enthused. He leaned forward to snake one arm around his winnings and shoveled the mass of coins and other Earther plunder into the satchel at his side. The winking facets of the compressed carbon nuggets he’d taken from Diamond Valley glittered under the kerosene lamps suspended overhead. And in the eyes of the greedy males.

  They’d been lured in by his rough diamonds, only to lose everything but their very nice shirts. He could’ve won by means more fair—counting the cards, enticing them along until they’d bet the literal house. But he didn’t want to be a saloon owner, and cheating was just as easy as playing fair. Hence the ace of hearts.

  One of the other players frowned at the untapped cards. Did he suspect the original ace was still in the pile where it had been surreptitiously shuffled? Obviously Jedediah James hadn’t noticed the absence of the card in his sleeve. Troy didn’t care what they suspected. If they objected too strenuously, he’d bring down the lamps and fire the whole damn place.

  “Wait a minute, partner,” James said, rising at the same time Troy did. “You can’t leave just yet.”

  Tired of the subterfuge, Troy squared off to the other male. “Hoping to win it all back?”

  Though he’d worked hard since the crash to master the haphazard mannerisms of a cowboy fresh off the range, maybe something of his CWBOI programming leached into his expression. Custom War Bionic/Organic Impersons weren’t designed to be understated, although Thetas were encoded to be the most subtle and clever of the designations.

  Regardless, James stiffened. “Probably you’ve had enough of games, yeah? How about some drinking instead?” He gestured over his shoulder. “Cuddy, send my friend something from the top shelf.”

  With a brusque nod, the barkeep pulled down a bottle, poured heavy, and put it on a tray for one of the saloon girls.

  Troy had noted her before (he’d noted everyone from the moment he’d pushed through the double swinging doors) but had just as quickly dismissed her. Now, his nanites prickled a warning as she strolled toward them.

  Though her hips rolled with the studied allure of one of the saloon’s upstairs girls, her focus was fixed, hungry and unwavering, not on him but on the glass in her care. Her fine hair—dyed a purplish-red, unevenly, and some time ago—was piled onto her head, adding negligible inches to her already unremarkable height. The locks left to dangle beside her thin cheeks and down the slender column of her neck had been tortured into sharp, unnatural coils by what he guessed was some sort of heat treatment, judgi
ng by the faint tang of burnt hair that wafted toward him. But then the burning stench of the alcohol in the glass overwhelmed every other odor in the saloon, even the fragrance of bovine that clung to him by necessity of his disguise.

  “For you, cowboy,” she murmured, hefting the tray a little higher. The words and the tilt of her head were subservient, but her sidelong gaze on the none-too-clean glass was avaricious. Even as a shroud, he half hesitated to reach for it lest she bite him.

  “Well, thank you kindly, miss. Much appreciated.” Wary of her artificially purple-red mouth, he plucked the glass from her tray and tipped it toward James.

  The saloon girl watched him, her tongue delicately flicking out to touch her upper lip, as he raised the glass. The moment he gulped it all down, he tasted the analgesic stirred into the rotgut.

  Laudanum, they called it. Tincture of opium. His nanites buzzed in interest before breaking down the molecular components into just another energy source.

  When the saloon girl sighed, her shoulders slumped a bit. “Shall I get him another drink, Jed?” she wheedled. “Maybe two? One for him and one for me.”

  James grabbed her by the back of the neck, crushing the careful curls. “I don’t think you need any more, now do you, Nell?”

  She squeaked out a noise that was neither confirmation nor denial, and Troy wondered why she didn’t swing the hard edge of the metal tray into James’s face.

  To his surprise, he found himself flipping a few of his newly acquired coins onto the empty tray. “I’ll take the bottle,” he said with the extra volume that always accompanied Earthers with ethanol. “And the girl.” He peered at James. “And then maybe we’ll play again.”

  The hard-eyed male eked out a contorted leer. “Nell, get the bottle and take our lucky friend upstairs.”

  Tugging out of his hold, she sped to the bar. Each step kicked aside her ankle-length skirts to display the lace-up boots underneath. Those heels were another couple of inches that didn’t belong to her.

  She boosted herself halfway over the bar, the double-handful curve of her backside visible through the worn fabric of her dress. At least that part seemed to be all her…

  The barkeep held the bottle over his head with a mean laugh that broke off in a choke when the saloon girl jabbed her fist into his solar plexus. As the bottle in his grip lowered, she snagged it loose and slithered back with a mean laugh of her own. “Now don’t be stingy, Cud,” she chided. “The cowboy paid, fair and square.”

  Not exactly fair, but Troy wasn’t going to quibble, considering they were trying to drug him into unconsciousness or death. He held out one elbow to the saloon girl—Nell—and gave her a crooked grin. “Show me the way, charming lady.”

  “You didn’t pay for no lady,” she shot back with a matching smile. She threaded her hand through the crook of his arm with a flirting pinch of his biceps. “A true lady’ll cost you a pretty penny more’n me.”

  “Nah,” he murmured. “I suspect you’ll come dear enough, and you’re prettier than any penny.”

  Her fingers dug deeper into the meat of his arm. “No need to talk fancy,” she said with a pert flip of her fallen bruised-red locks. “Not when you got me a bottle of Jed’s finest.”

  “But you gotta share the whiskey,” he reminded her.

  She glanced up at him, her lashes half lowered and shadowing her eyes. “Oh, don’t worry, cowboy. I share everything.”

  She led him up the rickety stairs to the balcony walk that looked down over the main room. He’d already reconnoitered the building and knew that the closed doors housed the saloon’s other women. Nell took him to one of the open doorways and kicked it shut behind them. She swigged once from the bottle, then again, before pressing the back of her hand to her lips, silencing the shudder of her breath. When she closed her eyes, he had a moment to study her without her returned focus.

  She was poorly bred and poorly fed, resulting in an unfortunate dearth of useful qualities. The consortium that built and programmed shrouds would be appalled at such a careless waste of resources. Jedediah James deserved to burn. Not only was she short and scrawny, like some early born Earther lamb that wouldn’t survive until spring, her cheeks were pocked with the scars of disease, and when she finally opened her eyes, the blue-green-gray of muddy water was hazed by a lingering cloud of the same scarring.

  He wondered how much she could see through the cataracts. These were old disabilities and disfigurements, he guessed. She compensated with that coquettish tilt of her head to aim the clear portion of her corneas, and a thick layer of face powder filled in the lesser scars on her cheeks.

  The additional haze brought on by the draughts of laudanum was something else.

  When she lifted the bottle for another swig, he put a hand on her wrist. “Save some for me.”

  “Oh, all the important parts will still be here for you,” she said with a hint of impatience. “Never you mind.”

  She was of no use to him unconscious.

  He pressed harder on her wrist, forcing her to lower the bottle. Her jaw set, she angled back, and the faintest shiver went through her when she realized she couldn’t pull away. With another sigh—one he’d bet she used often—she gave in.

  Removing the bottle from her hand, he set it on the dresser next to the tin of the powder she used on her face and a bottle of perfume that must’ve worn off of her some time ago. When he turned around again, she’d unfastened all the small buttons down the front of her dress from neck to navel, letting the edges of the fabric gape wide to reveal bare skin. She sauntered toward him, her smile soft with yearning.

  But the clear portion of her scarred gaze was focused on the bottle behind him, not on him.

  She halted her advance with the pointed toes of her boots up against his. “So you won all of Jed’s coin and one of his whores,” she murmured. “How are you going to spend us?”

  Thetas shipped standard with easily customizable subroutines that could be adjusted for card counting, cattle rustling, and pickpocketing—or pick-sleeving, depending on where the cheating cards were kept. The seduction protocol was equally flexible, although this was his first usage of it.

  In little more than a heartbeat, he’d reviewed most of the hundreds of recommended protocols, wrapped one hand around her waist, and hauled her close.

  So this was to be a kiss.

  He brushed his mouth over hers, parting his lips a nanosecond after she opened hers. A flicker of annoyance at her hurry made him stiffen; he’d have gotten to that step of the protocol in a minute. She let out a breathy little sound—a moan, hot with whiskey—in the same instant he did. He wasn’t going to let her get ahead of him again.

  She reached down the front of his jeans.

  Straightening abruptly, he clamped his fingers around her wrist, harder than when he’d prevented her drinking. “Slow down there, miss. We’ve got all night.”

  She licked her lips. “Wouldn’t want the whiskey to get cold, would we?”

  Nothing could make the rotgut served here any worse than it was. But since he didn’t answer quick enough, she dodged around him and grabbed the bottle. Before he could object, she drank deep and wandered toward the bed.

  Anything he might’ve said withered on his tongue when she sprawled across the bare sheet—balancing the bottle as deftly as a shroud would, never spilling a drop—and rolled, kicking up her skirts to display her Earther female attributes.

  He’d been grown in a laboratory, pieced together from a cloned organic body and cybernetic implants, and programmed to kill on command. The kiss was as far as he’d ever gotten with his seduction protocol. And still the sight of her gave him pause for no discernible reason.

  Maybe it was the hitch in her voice when she held out the bottle to him. “Have another drink. Take the edge off.”

  Edge off what? Sexual relations? Drugging and robbing the customers?

  He drank. This time, his nanites were distracted by the aftermath of the kiss, and the ethanol burn
ed in his throat. The buzz made him drop one knee to the mattress before his microscopic protectors counteracted the opium.

  Their analysis informed him, via the saliva sample, that she had a transmittable infection. In another moment, the nanites had synthesized the cure and swept any presence from his system.

  With the remnants of the intoxicant fading in his veins and an inexplicable recklessness filling the void left behind, he set the bottle on the nightstand, leaned over Nell, and kissed her again.

  The bitter flavor of her mouth pigment was erased by the whiskey and the friction of their lips, and when he braced himself with one hand splayed between her exposed breasts, the thundering of her heartbeat rattled him to the core.

  He breathed out slowly, not quite a groan, exhaling a faint fog of his nanites. She wouldn’t notice, not with her clouded corneas, and anyway it wasn’t much. He couldn’t afford to give up his protections, not when James and his cohorts—including this broken bird in his arms—meant to take back what Troy had so recently won from them. But considering she was about to give him so much more, it seemed only fair to offer her this small respite from the risks of her employment.

  She gasped, arching upward so that his hand slid off her sternum to cup her small breast. Under the edge of his thumb, the pounding of her heart accelerated. “What did you…?” Her hazy eyes rolled back, and she gasped again, inhaling deeply.

  He frowned, looking down at her. She shouldn’t have felt the infusion, not so much anyway. She put her hand over her chest, clamping his hand over her breast.

  “Tell me where James keeps his safe,” Troy murmured.

  Long lashes fluttering, her muddy-water gaze fixed on him. “Safe?”

  Troy gazed down at her. His own reflection—tanned, bearded, weather-beaten hat still on—stared back at him from the silvery mist of his nanites suspended in the clear parts of her eyes. “I scanned everywhere, but I can’t find it. He’s too greedy and suspicious not to have a safe somewhere on the premises. Tell me where it is, and I’ll leave the rest of the whiskey with you.”