Mike stifled a wince, put on his game face, and stepped away from Liam. He noted the guy looked uncomfortable, if the hunched shoulders and red face were any indication. Mike slapped him on the back, the same way he would have if Liam had just bought him a drink, and strove for a calm expression, even though he felt about as beastly as a just-hatched.
“Thanks for the dance,” he said. ::Fall back,:: he ordered his group.
::The vehicles, :: Steve added.
Yeah, he should have said that, but in his defense he was a bit rattled.
“We got your back,” Steve said from beside his elbow.
The mass of humanity surrounding them parted as the Urilqii surged. Together, they moved through the crowd, like a flight of birds navigating through a stand of trees, each slipping between obstacles with the shift of alignment, weight and angle. All the while, they maintained an arm’s reach distance between each other. The crush of humanity thinned the farther they went from the music, but the noisy thunder of scampering feet reported followers. When the opportunity arose to quicken the pace, they took it and shifted into a fast jog that left the curious and their recording devices behind.
In time, they arrived at the area where their ground transport waited in the care of the armed protective team he’d brought along for the party. Everyone hauled aboard with the clatter of boots, chatter, and the slamming of doors. Locks engaged with soft clicks. Engines engaged with a hard cough and a primal growl.
A quick check of their surroundings—the panting crowd behind them had stopped a distance away from the vehicles, where they looked curious but not aggressive—and with a mental prod from Mike, they rolled for base.
He stared outside the window as the vehicles sped along the hard, night-darkened landscape’s protective surface and counted the pathway illuminations as they blurred past. As distractions went, it wasn’t much, but it did the job to keep his mind off what he’d just done.
The memory of his dead adnama’s face blasted into his mind.
The last moments of Arvidnan’s life. How he’d mouthed, Live for me, as the breathable atmosphere bled from his shattered space suit.
He pushed aside painful memories. Easily done this time because the glances Steve threw his way wore on his nerves. He strove to ignore them, but had to stop playing oblivious when Steve cleared his throat and worked the vents, turning on the fans to clear Mike’s sex-scent from the cab.
Yeah, it was all over his clothes and clung to his skin and hair.
It was natural, normal, but embarrassing since the only one to breathe it now was his pod-kin. He cracked open the side viewport on his side of the vehicle to let in some air and help the vents clear the area.
Steve said nothing else, but continued to throw glances Mike’s way. Each one felt like a slap. He slanted his own, less friendly, glances in return. If Steve didn’t quit, a swim in the river would happen, tossed in so his star-spotted hair map could bob among the waves like whitecaps.
Steve choked on a laugh.
Mike brooded harder.
Arvidnan had been a fantastic enhancement to Mike’s life. The wound of his adnama’s death still bled. He doubted that wound would ever heal. The vacuum of space had stolen the actual words, but Mike believed, to the bottom of his core, he’d interpreted the message.
Arvidnan had been both demanding and generous. He’d shut down his thoughts to keep Mike from feeling the trauma of his injuries, but one thing came though their link with a force. He’d wanted Mike to live. To do more than that. He’d wanted Mike to love.
Sweet stars, it fucking hurt. With every awakening, the hurt stabbed him in his heart. Finally, he couldn’t take the sideways glances anymore.
“Eyes on the path,” Mike snapped to his pod-kin.
“Sorry,” Steve said.
Steve didn’t sound apologetic. In fact, apology wasn’t the emotion coming from his pod-kin. It was closer to delight. Mike wondered if the pressure to say what was on Steve’s mind would cause him to pop a vein in his skull, so he gave in with a sigh.
“You may as well say it,” he grumbled.
Steve didn’t hesitate. “Welcome back to the game.”
“What game?”
“The game of life.”
He’d been on this planet for only two orbits, but he’d learned enough of the local vernacular to know a turn of phrase that was perfect for a moment just like this.
“Fuck off.”
CHAPTER 3
“Liam? Get out here, man!”
The excited shout pulled Liam’s attention away from his reflection in the bathroom mirror. He couldn’t call it “morning” when he managed to haul his ass out of bed, but at least it was Monday. Or had he lost a day and it was Tuesday A.M.?
Judging by the sick-ass cast to his face, he could have. Red-eyed and with a mouth that tasted like a trashcan, he could have been on a serious bender. Unless someone had dropped some serious party favors into his beer, though, a trashed weekend wasn’t what he remembered.
Liam spun his recent memories in his mind. He remembered the Festival; the dancing; Gorgeous; grinding on Gorgeous; the kiss—holy hell, the kiss—the mob after them; him getting dragged away by his buddies and to their RV parked at the campground; the mob following them; security protection summoned; Sunday spent with men in black; and finally, back home Monday dawn to crash.
No, not a bender, but something else, something way more fantastic.
He shrugged away the shout from the other room and tipped his head to the side to resume his study of the bruised skin at the hollow of his left ear. A hickey. Really? When was the last time he’d had one of those?
“Get the fuck in here!”
Matt’s shout was joined by other voices, those of his roommates, who also howled his name in summons. Eh, whatever.
He wiped the last bit of toothpaste foam from the side of his mouth and shoved the toothbrush onto his shelf in the medicine cabinet. A flick of his wrist swung the mirrored door closed, and he headed out of the bathroom toward the excitement.
In the living room, he discovered his four roommates perched on the dilapidated furnishings, staring at the scratched, divorce-sale television set against the wall. The display reported what looked and sounded like a live news feed from CNN. So fixated were they on the presentation, none of his roommates commented on his arrival.
“What?” Liam griped.
They hissed at him like a nest of snakes. Jeff grabbed the remote and turned the volume up. All the way up. Soon the voiceover narrative filled the room loudly enough that his ears rang. Or maybe his ears rang because his name and face were on the TV.
“What the hell?” He pushed farther into the room. The back of the sofa forced him to stop. He squinted, refused to believe, but yeah. That was him.
Someone had released the video of his brief make-out session at the festival to the news, and the news thought it was newsworthy. So, there he was, in all his vapid glory, tongue dancing with an alien amid the bright, neon lights of Paradiso.
“You gotta be shitting me,” he said.
“It’s all over the news,” Alex replied. He’d tilted the bowl of cereal in his hands and didn’t seem to realize it was streaming white liquid over the side and onto the stained brown carpet.
“Every channel.”
“Quiet,” Justin snapped. He leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees, his gaze unwavering on the screen. “Let’s hear.”
“For fuck’s sake,” Liam grumbled, “you don’t need to hear. You were there, you—” His tongue froze and his mouth went dry.
The screen now displayed the Urilqii’s mouthpiece, Mr. Robertson, standing at a podium in front of a crowd of news people and speaking into a cloudburst of microphones. Gorgeous stood beside Robertson. There was no way Liam could ever forget his— Shit.
“Liam, you seeing what I’m seeing?”
The screen had flicked to the soldier on the other side of Robertson. Or was this guy Gorgeous? What the hell? T
wo of them?
“Which one is your guy?”
That sounded like Jeff, but it was hard to tell with the buzzing in his brain. And in order to answer that question, Liam needed a closer look. He stepped over the back of the sofa, almost knocking Alex in the back of the head with his foot, and closed in on the TV.
Mr. Robertson talked. The kiss-at-the-dance feed repeated itself on the lower left of the screen. The cameras flicked images of Urilqii onto the screen in the upper right. Gorgeous and…Gorgeous…stood bareheaded beneath the lights, an unusual occurrence, and braved the unrelenting attention without a flinch.
Behind them, other soldiers in dress uniforms and the familiar headgear stood in a horseshoe-shaped arch.
Ready to protect; ready to defend.
They didn’t need weapons. They were weapons.
His roommates’ voices rose up behind him, something about him making a piss-poor window, to get his “ass out of the way,” before something cold and slimy, which could have been a spoon full of Rice Krispies, courtesy of Alex, splattered against his back.
Liam wasn’t about to move, but he did sit down. Hard. “Ho-ly fuck.”
A fuss over a kiss. A kiss had done this, giving him an all-nighter with suits. Now, also, the amazing reality of twin aliens, one of which he’d tongued. Something told him things were about to go really, really bad.
Mr. Robertson was talking.
Matt spoke over the man. “Which one’s your guy?”
“Shut up, bro,” said Liam. He inched closer to the TV.
“And as such, you have our express apologies,” Robertson said.
“Please be assured there is no risk of a soft invasion. We require both genders to reproduce, as do you. This gesture was one of politeness and respect, nothing more.”
He paused and swept his gaze across his audience.
“I welcome questions.”
The room exploded into noise. Shouted questions zinged from all sides of the press area. Handheld camera shutters stuttered, chairs scraped, people lurched to their feet and waved their arms for attention. News cameras stood sentinel on their tripods at the side and back walls of the room, manned by users hunched behind them with headphones on their ears.
A florid-faced beanstalk of a man shoved his way through the cluster of reporters on a determined path to the front of the room.
He wore a green apple-colored T-shirt that displayed EARTH PURE across the front and he carried a megaphone in his hand. He raised it to his face. A tormented squeal of sound split the area and brought a collective wince.
“That sickening, unwholesome behavior isn’t welcome here.”
The handheld device turned his hate speech into a vituperative roar. The room fell silent, mouths fell open and expressions slackened from shock. Cameras zoomed in on the audience. Liam knew this because more cutaway squares filled the bottom of the screen as small images were loaded onto the data feed.
“I understand your concerns,” Robertson replied, smooth as chocolate silk cake. “I regret that my soldier’s actions have caused anxiety. However, Sergeant Mike thought only to return the gift of affection and regard that was given to him by—”
The Earth Pure jackass cut in with another roar. “He kissed that guy!”
For a moment, no one said anything. Robertson looked puzzled. A micro-expression flashed across his face, which was replaced by a mask of polite regard. Liam couldn’t read his mind, of course, but he would have sworn the flittered expression translated to, “What the fuck?”
“Please, forgive my confusion,” said Robertson, “but am I to understand the greatest issue here is that my soldier returned a gesture of regard, in the manner it was given to him, to another male?”
“You’re damn right, it is,” spat the goon.
The megaphone gave another earsplitting squeal. Everyone but the Urilqii cringed. Now there was no question about the expression on Robertson’s face. It reflected a man dumbfounded.
“I see. Ah…well…” He struggled to say something, but stalled out and confessed, “I don’t understand. Is it your wish our soldiers not partake in the entertainments of your communities?”
The Earth First protestor pulled the megaphone from his face and snarled, “Not to kiss a guy.”
Robertson continued to struggle. “Your males do not…kiss?”
“Only girls!”
“You are not comfortable with our association with your females due to the concern for a soft invasion. Do you mean to say you are also uncomfortable with our association with your males and for the same reason? Unplanned fertility?”
“No, damn it. I’m saying—”
Another voice cut in, this one female. “You’re saying that two men kissing is repellant. Disgusting. Shameful.”
Cameras and heads turned. A woman was spotted as the probable interruption because she was currently trying to shove her way past the brace of security guards that blocked the doorway.
Lenses zoomed in for a closer look.
She wore the rainbow-colored shirt of an LGBTQ advocate group and a leather Confederate officer’s cap decorated with a chain atop its bill. Others behind her, ones similarly garbed, pushed and shoved, sending ripples through the knot of arms, legs and bodies.
“Of course it is.”
The goon spat the reply after favoring her with a sneer.
Bedlam ensued: screams, insults, shouts and even tossed chairs.
One of his roommates muttered, but Liam couldn’t guess who had made the sound. Each wore near identical expressions of shock, horror, and nausea. The exact emotions stirring Liam’s guts.
It’s just a fucking kiss, dammit!
“We have no wish to offend, so please educate us,” said Robertson. “Apparently, returning what we believed was a gesture of regard is an incorrect action. In actuality, the gesture was an insult. Then what’s the accepted response? Are we to return the insult verbally, to withdraw, or perhaps enforce a soldier’s personal boundary via minimal violence? Is minor forehead-to-forehead contact acceptable? Or hand-to-face combat with no actual damage?”
But no one was listening to him. They were busy shouting their viewpoints. When a fistfight broke out, Robertson gave up. He stepped away from the podium, summoned his people with a gesture, and the Urilqii exited. The live news feed continued to roll, documenting the brawl.
Liam fell backward onto the carpet and covered his face with his hands. “Oh, shit…oh, shit…oh, shit…”
He repeated the litany, sickened. What was nothing more (or less) than a hot-as-hell-kiss had turned into an interspecies incident. Way to fucking go.
Jeff lowered the volume. A spoon scraped inside a bowl. Rice Krispies crunched. The window blinds came down with a couple of hiccups as Matt tugged on the cord. The room darkened as the outside world was blocked from intruding.
“Just shrug it off, man. I’ll blow over in a week, maybe two. Plenty more shit happening on this rock than two dudes kissing.”
Alex didn’t sound the least bit confident about his suggestion.
Liam groaned. “Christ, I hope so.”
Was it wrong to pray for an earthquake or something? Not with deaths or calamity or shit, but with enough rolling rock to divert the media’s attention.
* * *
The distraction didn’t last a day, however. Tuesday dawned with an artificial circle sliced from the sun’s glowing orb. The Targolt ship had arrived. That afternoon, Liam stood with his friends in the blocks-long line outside the neighborhood military recruitment office.
Determination steeled his spine. Defiance filled his heart.
Earth was their home. She would not be taken.
* * *
Deep inside the bowels of the Urilqii outpost near the confluence of the Pacific Ocean and the Columbia River, Sergeant Mike and his cabal’s command staff stood around a holographic display and contemplated the ugly, aggressively alien ship just beyond the system’s star’s corona. Waves from the recent warp of space’s
fabric disturbed the holograph’s images.
The Targolt used the gravity well of a star to thin and stretch space to the point they could simply push through, like a rock thrown into a pool of water, leaving the egress of space fabric to slam closed with a ripple of sound and stress. Urilqii equipment could document and trace the event.
Space was a very busy place, all things considered. But tracking the ships was the easy part. Battle, however, was not.
Neither the Urilqii nor the Targolt enjoyed greater than a fifty-fifty chance of success at any time. The slimy bastards were hard to kill.
They probably felt the same way about his people.
Fuck ’em. They shouldn’t have screwed with his planet in the first place. We defended our home and kicked their asses off it.
More, that one bad choice had brought the Targolt losses, defeat, and had forged an eternal enemy. Now the Urilqii avenged their home world’s damage by going hard to the limit—and beyond.
The division commander’s image shifted in the periphery of his vision and pulled Mike from his thoughts. Deployed on the far side of a gas giant and inside the flagship parked in the shadows thrown by the rings, High Commander’s holograph crackled and flickered from space fabric’s recent disturbance.
His and their two other cabals had been busy in the system, setting space-faring tools and processes in place to protect Earth once his people departed. The Targolt arrival, however, had pulled everyone’s attention from boredom and duty to intensity and eagerness.
“Leagues of the information are missing from this dynamic,” mused High Commander. “The necessary liquid has not yet risen over rock and yet they arrive.”
He reached a finger on his side of the communications to tap his screens, which caused everyone’s display to shift. The Targolt ship began a slow rotation that allowed every side and angle to be examined.
“Armed”—the E’ssennet cabal commander, who stood beside Mike, stroked his chin thoughtfully—”and aggressive, no question.”
Arrival Page 3