Crux: A Sci-Fi Romance (The Jekh Saga Book 2)

by H. E. Trent

  She poked her head out of the door again. “Come on, girl. No one’s in here but Esteben, and he may as well be a shadow.”

  “How kind,” he muttered.

  “Bring that power cube.”

  “Who is outside?” he asked her.

  “Just Amy being a ditz.”

  “Ditz?”

  “Yeah. Like a dingbat.”

  “Right, a…dingbat.” Esteben couldn’t remember the last time he saw Amy. The woman was elusive, but that quality was likely how she’d managed to stay alive and on the planet during the conflict. They’d all done what they had to—those of them who’d had strong enough wills to live, anyway.

  Amy stepped in, her gaze immediately flitting around the room before landing on Esteben.

  She was an interesting-looking woman. In the half year of her tenure at the farm, she’d allowed the cherry red dye of her hair to fade to its more natural ginger tone. Her dark gaze was set in stark contrast to the near whiteness of her skin. When her emotions were high, which was frequent, her Jekhan heritage became far more apparent. Her skin flushed a tone far too red for human hues.

  She looked like her late, great father in many ways, though those ways were only apparent after having stared at her for some time. He didn’t think most strangers would immediately make the connection, though she was paranoid that they could all tell.

  She clutched a power cube in her hands, and her jumpsuit pockets seemed to be bulging.

  Esteben straightened up, curious as to what she might have within.

  Like him, she was something of a trader at heart. He’d been conditioned to make a living at it. She’d picked up the art of negotiation somewhat as a necessity.

  She looked slowly to Fastida and held out the cube. “Could only get one. If we blow that one up, we’re screwed. Try not to let that plug get too hot.”

  “Owen said that as long as we get this thing shut off within five minutes, we shouldn’t tax the hard drive too much. Hopefully we’ll be able to check the weather and pull messages at the same time. You got chips to transfer them onto?”

  Amy patted one of her bulging pockets. “I’ve got ten, but I doubt we’ll be able to pull that many messages in time, assuming there are even any waiting.”

  “There are always a bunch for you.”

  “Not for me,” Amy said quietly. “For Emania.”

  “Maybe you should start answering them. Let folks know you’re alive.”

  Amy grimaced, and pulled out the stool beneath the desk. “I’m not ready yet.”

  “Eventually, you’re going to have to let some folks outside of this farm and this town know.”

  “Yes. Eventually.”

  Fastida crawled under the desk, ostensibly to install the temporary power cube, muttering under her breath the whole time.

  Owen had probably been hard at work on the cube all night. The extra energy was necessary to grab a hold of one of the many satellite signals that formed the planet’s heavily damaged communications grid. The inhabitants had to wait until the planet rotated into the range of working signals.

  Esteben resumed his study of the maps, jotting notes directly onto the paper. Most of what he knew about the area was from his teen years—the last time his and Murki’s father had acquired goods from the Merridons before they’d perished. Although the demographics had changed, the best Esteben could tell was that the landmarks hadn’t. And if they hadn’t, there may have been a way to once again find the people who could actually do some good for Jekh’s revival. They’d been off the grid before the Terrans arrived, manning hidden trade outposts and maintaining small power substations. If he could find them, he could try to get towns like Little Gitano connected. And if they connected, they might just be able to organize.

  “Ouch. I think I shocked myself,” Fastida said.

  “Poor dear. You want me to get Brenna to do the hookup?” Amy asked. “I think she’s become immune to the jolts.”

  “Babe, that’s not a good thing.”

  Esteben needed to concentrate, but he kept one ear on the ladies’ conversation. The weather could be truly disrupting to their routines, and in two weeks, the farm’s inhabitants had installed only about seventy percent of the fence sensors. The thirty percent of posts that remained were in the section closest to the mountains, which made Esteben uncomfortable for a number of reasons.

  No one lived on the ridge, but people in the area frequently traveled up to the peaks to get a better look at the area. They could certainly camp at the base of the mountain and bide their time, too. He hoped that any farm in the area looked just as good as another and that the crooks would spread the misery around a little.

  “All right,” Fastida said. “I got it in. Get ready to hit that power button.”

  “I’m ready,” Amy said.

  “Annnnd, go.”

  Amy pushed the starter and immediately began to input commands.

  Fastida scooted out from under the desk and used the secondary screen to pull up the weather.

  Esteben moved closer to examine the big, angry red weather system floating across the screen.

  “Shit,” Fastida said. “That thing looks like a monster, and that’s only partial data, sweetums. Everything south of the lat line is missing, so we can’t see how big it actually is.”

  He sucked some air in through his teeth and crossed his arms over his chest. “Yes, the storm looks plenty big even without the extra data.”

  She clucked her tongue, then winced. “What are you thinking, like a week to pass?”

  He grunted. “Perhaps. Trigrian would be able to tell you better. My father always avoided taking trips to this area during this time of year because the weather is known to be unpredictable and often dangerous.”

  “Isn’t that part of the reason his parents died?” Amy asked.

  She was busily swiping download chips, pulling message parcels off for each name she scratched off the list she’d taken from her pocket. She appeared to have listed every occupant of the farm. Owen’s name was at the very top, which made sense. He needed to be in frequent contact with his associates on Earth who fed him better intelligence than he could get out of Buinet. Her name was at the very bottom. Esteben couldn’t conceive of any way in hell she’d be able to get down the list in five minutes.

  Perhaps that is what she hopes.

  “Yes,” he said in response to her question. “And you can take my slot.”

  “What?” She stopped swiping.

  “Keep going. You’ll run out of time. Don’t pull messages for me until the end.”

  “Oh.” She got back to work, swiping chips under the reader that had obviously been pre-programmed with recipient information in advance—a timesaving feature likely devised by Owen. Swiping the chips didn’t take much time. What did take time was waiting for the network to search for the messages and, further, to hide the fact the search had been done in the first place.

  Owen didn’t want the farm’s searches mined. There were private bounties out on all the McGarrys following the Buinet Riots, but they’d expired. Apparently, none of the people who originally took the jobs believed, in the end, that the efforts were worth the pay. Still, there were enough fortune hunters on the planet to try to make the grabs, anyway. People like Courtney’s spurned fiancé Reg Devin would have paid good money to grab a McGarry by the collar, even if they weren’t technically wanted for anything.

  Esteben had no particular desire to see any of them harassed—certainly not the mother of his niece, not the man doing his best to keep them all looped in to the goings-on on the planet, and definitely not the McGarry the primal Tyneali part of him had identified as a suitable mate.

  “Yes,” he repeated to Amy, as she swiped. “The transport vessel Trigrian’s parents were traveling in went off the rails in the mountain corridor. The combination of high winds and torrential rains knocked it off the mechanism. That had never happened before.”

  Fastida whistled low. “If something
that stable can be knocked off the rails, we’d best plan on not leaving the houses until everything blows over.”

  “That was a perfect storm. The confluence of improbabilities,” he said, squinting at the weather map again. “Conditions are always worse in the corridor because of violent microclimates and just…physics. If the wind hits at just the right angle, the air swirls inside like a vacuum. Incredibly dangerous and, unfortunately, that is the fastest route to this part of the continent.”

  The danger was why the area was still mostly unsettled. There were probably a number of savvy Jekhans hiding out in the caves there. He made a mental note to do further research.

  Fastida shut off her monitor, likely to divert energy and processor sped back to Amy’s efforts. “I’m not in any hot hurry to get down to Buinet or anywhere else, anyway.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “What’s there for me? If one of my fathers cared enough to find my mother or me, they would have tried to get a message out by now. We were in jails and prisons for years, and there wasn’t a single message waiting in all that time.”

  “You’re assuming they’re still alive.”

  She nodded, leaned her rear end against the desk edge, and crossed her arms over her chest. “Yeah. I am assuming that. I mean, they pretty much sold out Mother and me to buy themselves safety, so I believe they could have found some other way to ensure the same. Fucking cowards.”

  Esteben was learning to bite his tongue, and was doing so at the moment. She had the right to be angry, and he would never take that from her—especially given most Jekhan females’ tendency to be dispassionate. They didn’t have much drive for anger, and instead defaulted to resignation. But Fastida, like Esteben and Murk, probably had the perfect proportion of human and Tyneali genetics to make her a miserable rabble-rouser. There was nothing dispassionate about Fastida, nor her slightly more composed mother.

  And there was nothing cowardly about any of the men on the farm, either.

  Not even that fucking baker.

  Esteben pinched the bridge of his nose and forced a ragged breath out of his mouth. He hated making concessions to the competition. Always had, even back when he’d been the most aggressive trader in Buinet.

  “I do worry about my little brothers, though,” Fastida said. “And I know Mother frets about them, even if she shouldn’t. She’s weird that way.”

  “They’d be grown by now,” Amy said.

  “Hard to think of them that way. They were still baby-faced kids the last time I saw them.”

  “Have you tried sending messages directly to them?” Esteben asked.

  She shrugged one shoulder. “I guess I haven’t wanted to risk the contact. If they think like their fathers, they won’t give a shit about Mother or me. They’d be looking out for themselves, and I’m certainly not going to extend any invitations for them to come here if they’re still on the run. You can call me petty for feeling that way, but I don’t care. It has taken me a lot of years to forgive myself for that, but I’m not going to keep beating myself up over the choices other people made.”

  “I think that’s wise,” Esteben said.

  She furrowed her brow in that “Are you joking?” way the McGarry sisters so often did.

  He groaned inwardly. He couldn’t get away from hints of Erin even when he tried.

  “Jekh is a planet with an unstable population as far as genetics go,” he said. “Blame the Tyneali and their incessant experimentation for that. Of course we don’t have the same triggers and urges. Given another thousand years of mixing, perhaps our demeanors would all flatten into sameness, but I can’t be concerned with that right now.”

  “I guess I shouldn’t be either,” Amy said quietly. “Pretending that I was brave was easier when I had everyone believing I was just human. Now, I’m both a coward and a fraud.”

  “You did what you had to do to stay alive,” Fastida said.

  “Did I, though?” Amy pulled a download card from the computer and shoved it into her pocket. “Did I keep my life at the expense of someone who might have actually been useful in this mess?”

  “I’d say you’ve been very useful.” Apparently, Headron had caught the end of the conversation and had been leaning into the doorway of the building without them noticing. His lack of noise upon approach may have had something to do with the fact that he was, for some reason, barefooted.

  Esteben closed his eyes and rolled them.

  Bakers could afford to be undignified. The lack of refined etiquette somehow suited the graceful man. He didn’t have to practice the relaxed air he put on. He simply was that casual. Esteben wished he could be at times.

  “Oh, Headron.” Amy sighed. Esteben opened his eyes and watched her hit the power button on the hard drive. “You always did know the exact right thing to say. And I’m done by the way.”

  “You’re done?” Fastida furrowed her brow and bent over Amy’s list. “You got them all?”

  “Yeah. The power cube helped keep that processor zipping along.” Amy looked to Headron. “Checking on the weather?”

  “Yes. Erin sent me over.”

  Esteben ground his teeth and pinned his unseeing gaze on his maps.

  Still with him, in spite of…everything.

  “Well, tell her the storm looks like it’s going to be bad,” Fastida said. “I’m heading to the main house now to let Courtney and Trigrian know. They said that every building on the property with low thresholds may be unfit to reside in during the heaviest of the rain.”

  That bit of news made Esteben perk up quickly. His house was one of those low-threshold buildings. Many Jekhan homes were built partially underground to make heating and cooling more efficient, but obviously, having doorways that were below ground level made the rooms prone to flooding. There were efficient-enough drains in the buildings, but the rooms wouldn’t be enjoyable to reside in when water was still seeping in.

  He rolled up his map, tucked it into its tube, and headed to the door. “I suppose I’ll go get my belongings off the floor in the lady’s cottage.”

  “I’ll get everything off the floor in here,” Fastida said. “I’ll push all the electronic stuff into the storeroom. Nearly impossible for the water to reach back there. Floor slopes upward in there.”

  “I’ll help you move the table.” Headron slipped past Esteben in the doorway, making Esteben bare his teeth reflexively as he went.

  His Tyneali genetics made him more sensitive than the average Jekhan male to perceived threats. While his last dose of Marscadrel may have tamped down some of his more violent impulses, he couldn’t change the seeds that had already been planted. He’d known Erin before Headron had come into the picture and, in his mind, he had the rightful claim.

  That was base instinct, though. He wasn’t an animal. He could think at a higher level and rationalize that, in spite of his predilections, he could be civil.

  “Not feeling civil,” he said through clenched teeth as he looked back over his shoulder at the office.

  He was feeling murderous, but the difference between him and the animal he’d behaved like for many years was that he could take steps to control himself.

  He just needed to stay away from Headron by any means necessary.

  He could worry about keeping Headron away from Erin later.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “They’ve got to be out of their ever-loving minds.”

  Tapping the edge of her tablet against her palm, Eileen paced in front of the kitchen table in her studio apartment in Buinet.

  She’d read every word within the device three times, and had needed to walk three kilometers past the city limits to the nature preserve to do it. The text didn’t show up until, as the commissioner had said, Eileen was in a safe place where not even the boldest hacker could access the machine.

  She’d sat there in the marshes, reading and re-reading, nearly oblivious to the local wildlife hissing and skittering around her, and wondering if she were foolish for even conside
ring the proposition.

  “Oh, I’m definitely foolish.”

  She stopped pacing and looked down at the blank tablet screen. She needed someone to talk to—someone to help her decide—but there was no one. Calling her mother was out of the question. Even if Eileen could get a secure COM connection out of her apartment to make the call, she wouldn’t want her mother to fret. Besides, communication access to Earth had been spotty since the riots. Some Jekhans had sabotaged the wiring in her zone.

  “And good for them,” she muttered.

  She paced again and tapped the tablet some more.

  With Amy gone, there was no one else in Buinet she could call a friend.

  “That’s my own damn fault. Should have tried harder.”

  She’d never been the easily trusting sort, though. Although she wanted to think the best of people, her optimistic outlook had evaporated when she was around fourteen and found the first past due bill notice stuffed into the breadbox. At that point, she’d decided that it was Momma and her against the world and that they needed to rely on themselves before anyone else.

  She’d taken the shuttle job with eyes and ears wide open. She’d questioned everything, even if not aloud, and assumed by default that no one meant well. That had been smart in the end, but her adopted philosophy made life lonely.

  “Okay. Let’s think this out.” She found a notepad that still had a few sheets of paper attached, and a pencil, and then sat at the table. She divided a page into three columns. The first read “Do Nothing.”

  The second read “OMG.” Although she planned to toss the pad into the incinerator when she done brainstorming, life on Jekh had made her untrusting enough to not want to explicitly write out her thoughts in longhand. “OMG” stood for “Owen McGarry.”

  The third column read “Girls.”

  The first choice was pretty self-explanatory, and was always an option. She could say no and find some way to get the hell off Jekh and back to Earth on her own, even if she had to drop her panties, spread her legs, and trade snatch for a ride. The commissioner had been clear in that in every part of the report.