Roark (Women Of Earth Book 1)

by Jacqueline Rhoades

  The sound of the key in the lock signaled David’s arrival and he wasn’t alone. Smartass from The Buzz was with him.

  “I could hear you two all the way down the hall.” David’s scowl would have given them his opinion of it even if the tone of his words had not. “I can’t see that we have anything to laugh about.”

  It was as if the truce they’d found on the night of the bombing had never happened. David was again in one of his snarling teenaged moods.

  “It would be a pretty poor life if we couldn’t find something to laugh about,” Wynne told him.

  “Yeah? Well, in case you haven’t noticed, we live a pretty piss-poor life.”

  He looked to his friend as if seeking approval of his performance. It was the same look the older boy had given his friends at The Buzz. Mira gritted her teeth while she debated what to do about it.

  He threw his jacket on the recliner before circling the table to the tiny refrigerator. Opening it and finding it empty, he turned back to his sisters. “There’s never anything to eat in this place. I suppose there isn’t any beer left either.”

  “I don’t know why you’re worried about the beer. You’re not old enough to drink it anyway.”

  His friend snorted a laugh and David bristled.

  “I’m old enough to do whatever I fucking please,” he snapped.

  “Then maybe you should buy your own beer,” Mira snapped back.

  “Maybe I will.”

  Peacemaker Wynne started to rise from the table. “Why don’t you introduce us to your friend, Davey, while I find you two something to eat?”

  “Yeah, Davey, be polite and introduce us.”

  The way Smartass looked Wynne up and down made Mira’s skin crawl. Wynne sat back down. She looked expectantly to David who shrugged.

  “This is Bret.”

  “Stay right where you are, Wynne. David’s perfectly capable of taking care of himself. It’s the rest of us he doesn’t give a damn about. Isn’t that right, David?” She was furious that her brother had no response to Bret’s leering look or his sister’s discomfort. “I’m going to ask you to leave,” she said to Bret, who just became Smartass Little Bastard in her mind. “It’s already past our bed time and Wynne has been busy all day. She deserves a rest and we both have to be up early tomorrow.”

  Bret shrugged. “Sure, you have to get up early to go collaborate with the enemy. That’s what they’re saying, you know. You’re collaborating.”

  Mira felt the blood drain from her face. Fists clenched, she rose from the table. “Why you little...”

  “That’s not true, Bret,” Wynne interrupted, her voice quiet, but firm. “And don’t you dare repeat that in this house again. I was in Clooney’s yesterday. People were excited about the possibility of work. There are rumors about more construction and someone heard there was a clinic opening and asked what Mira knew about it and would they be hiring nurses. A few even asked if I thought she could get them a job. So don’t you say people are calling her a collaborator. They’re not.” She turned to her sister.

  “You know Mrs. Pulaski, Mira. If there’s someone to complain about, she’s the one who’ll be the loudest and she doesn’t care who hears her. She wants you to put a flea in someone’s ear. That’s what she said, a flea in someone’s ear about getting the police back on the street to get rid of some of those punks that hang around on the corners. She had a lot to say about them, but not a single bad word about you.”

  David turned his face away, but not before Mira caught the shadow of guilt that crossed over it. She watched his shoulders heave and when he started to turn back to them, she thought it might be with an apology. She was wrong. The face he showed them was hardened with his anger.

  “That’s because she’s as stupid as you are,” he spat. “They don’t see the game the Godan are playing, the big picture. They’re building those towers to spy on us. They’re only clearing the streets to make it easier for them to put down any rebellion.”

  Bret nodded in agreement. “All that other stuff is just their way of trying to suppress the people.”

  “Who’s feeding you this crap?” Mira asked and then wanted to kick herself for asking. She knew the answer.

  Mira felt the weight of her world come crashing down on her shoulders and they sagged beneath it. She was tired, but it wasn’t sleep she needed. What she needed was just one day without worry about money, housing, food, fuel, kids, and brothers running with a band of idiots. Hell, even a few hours would be a relief, just so long as someone else was in charge.

  “Anthony Tomaselli is using you,” she said and even she heard the hopeless exhaustion in her voice, though she tried to hide it. “I don’t know what he’s telling you, but I guarantee it’s a lie.”

  “No it’s not,” Bret snarled. “He said you’d say that. You hate him because he dumped you and you’re working for them. He’s raising money for the cause and as soon as they have enough, you’ll see. There’ll be a rebellion and we’ll drive the Godan out and when we’re done with them, we’ll go after the Hahnshin. He says you could help us if you didn’t have your nose stuck so high up your ass, thinking you’re smarter and better than everybody else.”

  “David, are you listening to this?” Wynne asked, appalled.

  He refused to look at Wynne. “I’m not a little boy anymore and you can’t tell me who I can hang with,” he said to Mira.

  There was a look of pleading in his eyes. It was as if he was asking her to understand what he was doing, but she couldn’t. He shook his head in sadness or disgust, she wasn’t sure which, and grabbed his coat from the chair.

  “I’m going out.”

  “David, you don’t have to go,” Mira said where a moment before she would have said, “Good riddance.”

  “Yeah, I do.” He motioned to Bret with a nod to the door. “Let’s go get a beer.”

  “What are we going to do?” Wynne whispered when they could no longer hear the footsteps on the stairs.

  “I don’t know, Wynne.” The feeling that she was missing something crucial was still with her. “But it’s more important than ever that I keep that job. We need to move out of this neighborhood and away from Anthony Tomaselli. So tomorrow, you start looking and I’ll start kissing some alien ass.”

  Chapter 9

  Mira showed her ID at the gate, and received the same nods from the armor encapsulated guards as she received every morning since that first day. Her knees were still shaking from fear that she’d be turned away as she walked across the grounds to the office she shared with Sergeant Mohawk. It was raining, and most of the people she passed had their heads down against it. Those few who happened to glance up as she passed, nodded in recognition. A few of those did a quick double take, but their looks weren’t unfriendly, just appreciatively surprised and those looks told Mira she hadn’t made a mistake.

  In anticipation of being rejected at the gate, Mira wore a pair of snug fitting jeans tucked into low heeled boots that came to her knees. It wasn’t the strictly modest and understated professional look she usually went for, but being tossed down into the mud in a skirt wasn’t very modest or professional looking either. Not knowing Commander Roark well enough to gauge his reaction to her disobedience, she was taking no chances.

  Her choice wasn’t solely based on durability. Miles of walking and stair climbing over the past six years had given her a high, firm ass. The scooped neck sweater she wore beneath her denim jacket molded to her breasts and clung to her waist. And if she should meet with the Commander, she wanted him to remember what he’d said about the Bride Market and the value of her figure. Short of throwing herself, naked, into his arms, it was the best she could come up with to let him know she’d changed her mind.

  Mohawk was already at his desk in the inner office muttering to himself when she entered. Shaking the rain from her jacket and the scarf that covered her head, she called hello to him and hoped he hadn’t been given the duty of firing her. She was growing fond of the blu
stery sergeant whose bark, she’d learned, was a great deal worse than his bite. His misguided use of the thesaurus was a reaction to his fear of not doing the job as properly as he was ordered to do.

  She’d learned this when she’d finally lost her temper over one of his garbled notices. “Damn it, Sergeant, just say it how you think it and I’ll translate it. I promise I’ll print exactly what you tell me.”

  “Fine fucking mess that would be,” he’d yelled back. “If you printed what I’m thinking, I’d be court-martialed by some glass-assed fart spewers and you’d be out of a job.” As if that weren’t enough, he’d given her an example of what he would say and she’d burst into laughter.

  “But wouldn’t you like to see the looks on the faces of the glass-assed fart spewers when they read it,” she’d sputtered and he began to laugh, too.

  After that, he made his words as plain and as foul as possible just to make her laugh. So that morning, his first sentences made her hesitate, largely because they contained no foul words.

  “I hate this job,” he shouted. “I can’t do it and they can’t make me do it.”

  She held her breath until he continued.

  “Local Communications and Development my ass. They know damn well I can only communicate a smack in the head to some dumb-assed recruit if orders aren’t followed. I’ve never done this shit before.” His voice became louder. “I didn’t sign on for this shit. I kill fuckers, damn it. I don’t fucking talk to them. All I did was lose a damned leg and this is what I get for it.” His complaint trailed off into a rumble that could have been indigestion, or a condemnation of the military hierarchy. It was sometimes hard to tell the difference.

  Mira poked her head around the corner of the partition that divided their work space. “You lost a leg? When?”

  “About a month before they stuck me behind this damned desk, that’s when. I got another two months to go before they let me back into the action, and let me tell you, missy, that’s eight fucking weeks too long. What the fuck is a newspaper and how in hell are we supposed to put one out?”

  “Wait!” She came fully around the partition to stand beside his chair, not the least bit embarrassed to be staring at his legs and pointing. “So, you’re telling me that six weeks ago you lost your leg and you’re up walking around like nothing happened. How?”

  “What do you mean how? They built me a new one same as they always do. In that Simulator whatchamacallit. I keep telling them that I’m good to go, but they keep telling me I got to wait until the pain goes away before they put me back on the line. And those damned Healers know when it’s aching. Aching, Bah!” He threw up his hands in disgust. “Aching’s nothing compared to getting the fucking thing blown off in the first place.”

  Mohawk showed no signs of having been injured. He stomped around in his heavy boots as if he were trying to crush his anger beneath them. What kind of prosthetic device had they created that would enable him to return to the front within a few months?

  “Can I see it?” She asked, overwhelmed by curiosity.

  The sergeant frowned, then shrugged, and rolled up his pant leg. “There’s nothing to see but a few scars.”

  There were more than a few scars. The leg, above the knee to where it disappeared into the pant leg, was a road map of healing tissue and old tattooed scars. Below the knee, however, the leg was circled with a continuous band of red, but healing tissue about an inch wide. Below that band was what appeared to be a perfectly normal limb. It was not, however, perfectly matched to the leg above it. The skin was too smooth, too fine, and free of the coarse black hair that grew above the knee.

  There was muscle-like movement beneath the skin of the calf when Sergeant Mohawk suddenly leapt to his feet leaving a startled Mira kneeling on the floor.

  “Oh, dear,” she sighed, looking up.

  The Commander’s Prime stood in the doorway. His eyebrows were raised and the corners of his mouth twitched up and down several times as if he couldn’t make up his mind whether to smile or frown.

  Fighting off the embarrassment of her position, Mira pointed out what Harm probably already knew. “Mohawk has an artificial leg. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Does that work the same as etchings or baseball cards?” Harm asked.

  Mira’s face flamed but it was Sergeant Mohawk who spoke.

  “What the hell are etchings and baseball cards?”

  “Nobody knows, but apparently they’ll bring a human woman to her knees.” He offered his hand to help Mira up from hers. “He wanted me to convey his orders to begin lessons on misunderstandings about them immediately,” he told her without the unnecessary explanation of who ‘he’ was.

  If her face was pink before, it was scarlet now. “I, he... I was planning to do that this afternoon,” she stammered as she followed him around the partition. Once safe from Mohawk’s prying ears and eyes she whispered, “Is he upset?”

  “Upset? I don’t think upset is the word I’d use. We call it agron co. I’m not sure how that translates.”

  Literally it meant angered up. Mira was pretty sure she knew how that translated. “Pissed off. Some people think PO’d is more polite.”

  “I don’t think he was aiming for polite.”

  “O-oh.” Mira’s shoulders slumped.

  “I think that’s a fairly accurate assessment.” Harm gave her a casual salute. “Message delivered. What is it you say? Oh yeah, have a nice day.”

  “Wait. Harm, do you think...?”

  The salute flattened into the universal sign for stop. “I don’t get paid to think. I get paid to keep his ass out of the line of fire, to watch his back, and keep things running in his absence. Anything else is above my pay grade, ma’am, which is fine by me. There isn’t a pay grade high enough for me to get involved with his love life. You’re on your own.”

  ~*~

  Mira shuffled the notecards that she used to jot down the key points of her lessons. She kept her head bent over her hands, but her eyes strayed constantly to the growing number of officers in the room. Today’s roster only listed twenty five, but the room was full and chairs were being brought in to seat the extras. Word had somehow gotten out about today’s subject. She didn’t know why she should be surprised.

  Once she had explained to Mohawk what a newspaper was, he showed her the list of what it should contain. Without advertisements or pictures, it was more of a newsletter than newspaper, but its purpose was clear. The publication was to inform the local inhabitants of what was happening in their sector and the plans for its improvement.

  It was to include the general plans for more construction with the priority given to schools and housing and the opening of the clinic. It also was to address the need for the establishment of a police force and the reorganization of the fire department from volunteer to part-time paid.

  Apparently, news and rumors flew through the base as quickly as they did through Clooney’s market, probably faster, since sex was obviously a hot ticket item in any language or culture. One minute before the class was to begin, the room was filled to capacity and the doors were closed. A mass of eager eyes focused on Mira.

  The eyes she was hoping to see weren’t there. She wasn’t sure if she was relieved or disappointed.

  “As you know,” she began, “the gates to the base will soon be open and you will be allowed out into the town during your free time. We’ve already talked about the possible reactions to the differences in your appearance to those of humans and how you should handle that, so I won’t waste time on it today. Today I’d like to talk about how to handle your introduction to human women.”

  She expected whistles, catcalls, and more than a few juvenile comments, but there were none. Her announcement was greeted with silence and a great deal of straightening of shoulders and rapt attention. They looked like a group of boys about to hear ‘the talk’ for the first time. Ah, the miraculous wonders of sex. She almost laughed.

  “I’ve invited Healer Vochem to sp
eak to you on Wednesday about the biological and physiological aspects of the human female. I’m pretty sure you all know what goes where and I really, really don’t want to know which of you doesn’t.” That earned her a few chuckles and she could see the men visibly begin to relax. She began to relax with them.

  “There are three types of human women out beyond that gate,” she told them, following her rule to begin with the simple and work up to the complex. “Sadly, the first group is comprised of those who will want nothing to do with you. They’ve made up their minds not to like you and there is nothing you can do about that except wait for time and familiarity to erase their prejudices.

  “The second group gets paid to like you. It’s called prostitution and also known around the globe as The Oldest Profession. I know I’m taking a shot in the dark here, but I’m going to assume it’s the oldest profession everywhere else, too.”

  A wave of murmurs passed through the crowd followed by quiet chuckles and then outright laughter as the reference became clear. This began a lively discussion of where the best entertainment could be found. Mira tried to maintain her professional face, but she did find it funny that this was another practice all races of men had in common. She let the conversation flow for a few minutes before calling the group back to order.

  “The third group is the most complicated. Since I can’t speak for the whole human world, I’m calling this discussion Dating Practices of Sector Three.”

  For the next two hours, questions were asked and answered about getting to know the female population of Sector Three. It wasn’t nearly as hard as she thought would be, since most of the officers had visited places where the rules were a lot more stringent. Unfortunately, little was said about practices on their home world of Mishra or Godan in particular.

  As with most of her classes, Mira ended up having fun. She was laughing along with the men as several of them argued about the best approach for a first kiss when she looked up and saw Roark staring at her over the sea of officers. She had no idea how long he’d been standing in the back of the room. She hadn’t seen him come in.