The Complete Harvesters Series

by Luke R. Mitchell

  Rachel shifted her focus to her staff, fidgeting. “I, uh, guess we might have a few things to talk about, but… surprise first?”

  Much as he’d resented being kept at arm’s distance these past days, now that she was here in front of him, Jarek was in no hurry to see Rachel do anything but smile for the time being.

  So he made a show of glancing around at the not-so-far-away work crews and said, in a hushed tone, “Like, here? Right now?”

  She wagged her eyebrows with more sarcasm than Jarek would’ve thought possible. “If you think you can handle it. How are you with your left hand?”

  “Oh, you bad girl…” He rubbed his palms together and clapped a hand on Fela’s shoulder. “Either there’s a sword waiting for me in that truck or I’m about to be one very happy man.”

  As it turned out, there was a sword waiting for him in that truck.

  “Eh,” Jarek said as Rachel uncovered the weapon that had been wrapped safely next to Fela for the ride, “I guess I’m still a pretty happy man.”

  “Hey”—Rachel hefted the weapon up from the truck bed with a mild effort—“I just got done playing with your Whacker all night long. What else could you want?”

  Jarek eyed the weapon more closely. “Huh. Color me intrigued.”

  The blade was sheathed, but it looked slightly smaller than his Whacker, and it had a slight inward curve, like a gigantic kukri, or maybe a kopsis or some other similar sword Pryce would be able to name for god knew why.

  Technical distinctions aside, Jarek was pretty confident about one thing. The curved blade would be all the better for lopping off rakul limbs.

  He accepted the sword from Rachel and actually listened to her advice to mind his shoulder as he drew it. The blade was indeed curved, and quite wicked-looking. It felt heavy in his bed-rested arms. It was heavy compared to any standard sword—maybe fifteen pounds or so—but the balance wasn’t bad, and it wasn’t intended to be used without Fela anyway.

  Most intriguing of all were the several glyphs etched on the flat face of the blade, not unlike those on Rachel’s staff and bullet catcher. And there, right near the cross guard, someone—almost definitely Pryce—had etched into the side of the blade, shallow but readily legible: Big Whacker 2.0

  “Yes!” Jarek cried, thrusting the blade triumphantly skyward. “Long live the Big Whacker!”

  Rachel snorted. Al clapped ceremoniously with Fela’s hands.

  Jarek slowly lowered the blade, trying not to wince at the pangs in his shoulder. “So, uh, what does it do?”

  “Hopefully not break, for starters. But there’s more.”

  “Do go on.”

  She nodded toward Fela and the ship. “Why don’t you suit up and find out for yourself?”

  He sheathed the blade. “Tease a guy, why don’t you. To the ship, Al! I need to be inside of you.”

  “I do hope you mean Fela, sir,” Al said as he remotely keyed the ship ramp open and marched the suit over.

  “You’re sure you’re up for this?” Rachel asked, following along behind. “I don’t want you to rip an arm off swinging a sword around too soon.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  For some reason, neither Al nor Rachel seemed particularly convinced by that one, but Rachel was clearly burning to see her and Pryce’s creation in action as well.

  Aboard the ship, Jarek began to strip down without a thought. There was only one way to properly don Fela, and clothes—at least beyond briefs—were not a part of it.

  “You look a lot better,” Rachel said quietly behind him.

  When he looked, she’d turned away to sit at the open boarding ramp while he changed. He grinned at her chivalrous attempt to protect his modesty and stepped into Fela’s embrace.

  Once suited, he took up the Big Whacker 2.0, giddy with excitement, and plunked down the ramp. He spun the blade through a few experimental arcs. The discomfort in his shoulder wasn’t crippling, but it was enough that he shifted to lefty for the next try.

  “You like it?” Rachel asked.

  He whipped it through one last arc and smiled at her. “It’s perfect.” He ran his thumb over one of the glyphs. “I’m still not sure what it does, though.”

  She gave him an impish grin. “Flip the switch on the pommel.”

  He did.

  Nothing happened—unless he counted Rachel growing visibly excited.

  “Flip the switch and…?”

  She wiggled her brows, and this time there was nothing sarcastic about it. “Give it a swing, big guy. Just be careful.”

  He frowned at the sword, shrugged, and spun it through another series of arcs.

  It was as if the blade were suddenly moving through a vat of molasses instead of air. Even stranger was the heat that radiated from the blade’s length, beating onto the sensors in Fela’s forearms.

  “Uh…” He looked from the blade to Rachel. “What?”

  Her smile widened. “Come on, man! A real swing. Put that suit’s back into it! You know, carefully though.”

  Jarek willed his faceplate shut more for affect than anything. “I feel like you’re giving me mixed signals here, Goldilocks.”

  With that, he set his feet, took a two-handed grip with his good arm in the lead, and stepped into a heavy overhand strike. Once again, the invisible molasses field pulled against the blade, but he swung hard enough that the strike still fell as fast as any swordsmen could’ve managed with a normally weighted sword.

  A flash of azure light seared the air inches in front of the blade’s path as it fell. That alone nearly jostled a surprised cry from his throat, but the gust of heat that swept over his arms and chest finished the job.

  “Holy shit!”

  Afterward, he stared dumbly at the blade, registering the smell of ozone in the air.

  He turned slowly to Rachel, who was watching him with a satisfied smile. “Goldilocks… did you just build me a lightsaber?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “There might be a copyright issue in there somewhere, but yeah—I got about as close as I could think to.”

  He willed his faceplate open. “I think I’m in love.”

  Her eyebrows crept upward as if by their own accord as she searched his face. Something about the expression made her look younger and more beautiful than she ever had.

  “With the sword,” she said, half-question, half-statement.

  He tilted his head, holding her stare. “We could go with that.”

  Her throat shifted in a visible swallow, her gaze pulling at him until he’d all but forgotten the sword in his hand. “So,” she finally said, “do you, uh… wanna go cut something?”

  The tension rushed out of his chest in a series of airy chuckles. “You bet your ass, I do.” He looked around the shipping yard like a dog at a butcher’s shop. “How hot does it get? Think it can cut through one of these shipping crates?”

  She shot an uncertain look at a distant crate. “I think so. Pretty much, the harder you swing it, the hotter it gets, right up until it caps out around ‘ridiculously freaking hot.’ You need to take it easy though. Don’t hurt yourself.”

  Jarek turned on his heel and darted off with a bark of laughter. After days of bed rest, the freedom of moving with Fela’s power wrapped around him was like heaven. He veered toward a shipping crate whose door stood ajar, calculated distance, made a small stagger step to adjust, and lunged into a hefty top-down diagonal slice.

  The blade fell in a flash of heat and azure light. The sword barely even kicked in his hand, but then the top corner of the crate door was falling.

  The hunk of corrugated steel hit the ground with a crash, its severed edge a trail of glowing molten metal that matched the one left on the downsized door.

  “Hell yeah!” Jarek shouted.

  He danced through a few turns, putting the blade through a smooth series of flourishes and hard strokes that brought the blade alive with glowing energy.

  With each swing, the extra resistance seemed more and more of
a non-issue. He merely had to remember to expect it and think a little further in advance to keep the movements smooth and flowing.

  He flipped the pommel switch to the off position and strolled back over to Rachel and the ship.

  He spun the sword through a few more loops, felt the blade to make sure it wasn’t too hot, then stepped up the ramp and slid it neatly into the sheath Rachel held out for him. “This is amazing, Rache.”

  She looked up at him, the sword lingering in their combined grasp for a stretch before Jarek moved the weapon to the side and stepped in closer to her. Before either of them could break the silence, he stroked her cheek with his thumb and bent to kiss her forehead.

  “Thank you.”

  She tilted her head back to meet his eyes, and something in his chest tried to do a barrel roll. She was just so damned cute when she bit her lip like that. Her hands slid slowly around his sides, and the hunger built until he couldn’t contain himself.

  He wrapped a hand behind her head and pulled her into a kiss. She lingered on the threshold for a second, hesitating. Then her arms tightened around him, casting aside all pretenses of self-restraint. Jarek dropped the sword on his recliner and slipped the free hand around the small of her back.

  When she pressed into him, he looped his arm the rest of the way around her waist and hoisted her off the ground, pulling one leg up to his side. She went with the motion and hooked her feet behind his back, their lips never parting for a moment. He slapped blindly at the wall, head spinning with raw need, until he found the switch to close the boarding ramp, and then he carried them into the cabin, pulling Rachel’s jacket off along the way.

  That was when Al decided to clear his throat in Jarek’s earpiece.

  He set Rachel down on the bed. “Run along, Mr. Robot.”

  Fela sprang open with a series of hard clicks and peeled away from his body. He stepped out, leaving nothing but the fabric of his briefs between him and Rachel.

  Behind him, Fela stood and jogged up to the cockpit to Al’s cries of, “Not looking! Not looking!”

  “Just go watch a movie in cyberland or something, you big baby!” Jarek called after him. He turned back to Rachel and saw hesitation creeping into her expression.

  He took her hands and pulled her to her feet.

  “We shouldn’t,” she whispered. “I—”

  He wrapped his arms around her waist and kissed her, relishing the feel of her all the more now that it was through his own hands rather than Fela’s tactile sensors. Slowly, inch by inch, she softened until her body was molded to his.

  When the faint moan escaped her, he lost control.

  They were on the cot before he knew it, twisting and twining in a desperate race to press their bodies together as completely as possible. Her shirt came off, and they pressed together again, the smooth warmth of her skin against his driving his brain in wild circles until he could barely see straight.

  They pulled hungrily at each other, too lost in the urgency of the moment to take more coherent action than simply mashing their bodies together.

  Unbidden, the memory sprang to mind of Drogan muttering something about mashing faces together like filthy humans, and Jarek laughed before he could stop himself.

  Rachel stiffened against him. “What?”

  “No, nothing,” he said quickly. “It’s nothing.”

  He descended to kiss her neck, but she stopped him. “Nothing?”

  Damn his giggly body.

  “I just, uh, remembered something Drogan said. About us squishy humans. It was nothing.”

  Somehow, that didn’t seem to put her at ease.

  “Oh,” she said.

  That single syllable was like a fine sheet of ice spreading between them.

  For a second, he considered trying to explain the tidbit about Drogan and Lietha, as if that might just clear the air, but no—a lesson in raknoth reproduction probably wasn’t the ticket to righting this suddenly sinking ship.

  As testament to that, Rachel added, “Guess the two of you really hit it off, huh?”

  Her expression was a forced neutral, but the way she said it—the unspoken suggestion that such a thing was morally reprehensible—had Jarek spitting out his rebuke before his better judgment had time to vote.

  “Wasn’t like I really had many alternatives on the visitor front.”

  He regretted the words almost before they’d finished leaving his mouth. This wasn’t what he wanted—the petty, scathing bullshit. The undue judgment. The shadow falling over Rachel’s expression, making it all the worse.

  “Jarek…” she said quietly.

  He couldn’t quite tell what it was in her eyes. Anger? Frustration? Regret?

  She looked away, refusing to meet his eyes. “I was—I didn’t want…”

  Tears glistened in her eyes, and intuition hit him like a charging raknoth.

  All this time, he’d been sure she was dodging him because she thought he’d be angry or at least want to lecture her about what she’d pulled with Alton.

  He’d never thought to imagine she’d simply been afraid of what he might think of her for it. Why would she be? Since when did she care what he thought? But that’s exactly what he saw in her face now. Remorse and fear.

  “Hey.” He took her chin and steered her eyes back to his. Or tried to.

  She resisted for a second and then snapped her face back toward him with a sharp huff of air, her eyes brimming with tears, remorse giving way to anger. “Dammit. Why do you—”

  He cupped her cheek with one hand and, feeling her jaw quivering with tension, shook his head. “I don’t care, Goldilocks. Never mind what whiny-bitch Jarek has to say about it.”

  She watched him uncertainly, looking like she was debating whether she should shirk his touch and retrieve her shirt.

  He shook his head again, willing her to believe him. “I don’t care. Not about what happened in the Himalayas. Not about what’s happened since. We’ve laid too much shit on the line for each other to let a second’s questionable judgment throw it all out the window.”

  Because a second’s misjudgment was all it had been. Call him naïve, but he was sure of that looking at her now. Whatever hang-ups she might still have concerning Alton and the rest of the raknoth, she wouldn’t be making a habit of sabotaging their war efforts moving forward. He trusted that.

  The quiver of her jaw intensified beneath his palm. Then, quietly, she said, “Don’t you mean defenestrate it?”

  He laughed, thinking back to the shootout in Deadwood she was referring to, when he’d complimented her on blowing a gunman through the window. Back when he’d been without Fela and they’d both been about two steps shy of knifing each other. It felt like such a long time ago.

  “You’re right.” He planted a kiss on her forehead. Her cheek. Leaned in until his lips brushed her ear. “Pardon my pedestrian tongue, m’lady. It tends to wander.” A light nibble. “You don’t happen to have any idea how we could keep it occupied?”

  Rachel shifted beneath him, clearly not hating the affections, despite the firm hand she planted against his chest.

  “You realize I almost got you killed,” she whispered, “right?”

  “Eh.” He leaned back to take her in—ruffled hair, tear-streaked face, and beautiful, shining eyes—and shrugged. “None of us gets to bat a thousand, Goldiloc—”

  She reached up and pulled his mouth down to hers, and he didn’t fight it.

  Before, their kissing had been insistent, frantic.

  The kiss she drew him into now, though, was deep and electrifyingly sensual—passionate, but in no hurry to get out of its own way or move on to the next step. It was full of care and warmth and the salty wetness of recent tears, and it made Jarek’s head spin like he’d just sprinted a mile with a gas mask full of nicotine.

  He was almost too stupefied to speak when she pulled back and whispered, “I’m sorry, Jarek.”

  “I, uh…”

  Words, dammit. He needed to use his wo
rds.

  Rachel’s face was crinkling into a smile now, her brow arching up at him. “You okay up there? You’re not having a stroke, are you?”

  “Oooh…” He dipped and planted a kiss on her breastbone, reaching for the button on her jeans. “You might wanna be careful using the word ‘stroke’ right now.”

  She laughed, resting a hand on his but not quite stopping him.

  And by the will of all the cruelest, most dastardly fates in the universe, her comm chose that moment to buzz against his side.

  “Shit,” Rachel whispered.

  For a few quick heartbeats, they held each other’s gazes, silently debating. Then some unspoken agreement passed between them, and she swiped the call away with a breathy laugh.

  He pulled her in for another kiss and skirted down the cot, slipping out of his briefs, moving to help her do the same with her jeans—each small movement she made, each touch of warm skin driving him wilder with need.

  The comm buzzed again.

  “Fuck it,” Rachel breathed.

  She was unfastening the intrusive device from her wrist and shifting her hips to aid Jarek’s endeavors with her jeans when Al spoke from the cabin speakers.

  “So sorry, sir, but we have multiple calls from HQ. It’s… Well, it appears to be quite urgent.”

  “You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Jarek growled.

  “My sincerest apologies, sir.”

  “Are we talking pants urgent?”

  “Indeed, sir.”

  Rachel sighed. “Guess we’d better check it out.”

  Jarek looked back and forth between her and the cockpit, praying for some magical development to float along and un-ruin what had been turning out to be a perfectly amazing day.

  No such luck.

  “Shit!” He kissed Rachel’s forehead and sprang off the cot, headed for the cockpit. “Take the call, then, Mr. Robot,” he said, stepping into Fela’s waiting boots stark nude. “And easy with the pelvic plate, buddy,” he added as Fela began to fold around him.

  The console holo sprang up, blank but for the buffering icon as the connection strained to add video to the call.

  “What?” he growled at the console before he’d even noted the ID.