by H. E. Trent
And she was going to hurt, knowing she was fighting for something that would never be hers—for a people she needed to keep at arm’s length even when she craved integrating.
She couldn’t belong to them. She couldn’t offer the Jekhans anything but constant reminders that she’d come uninvited to a place her people had destroyed.
“Fuck,” she whispered.
“Hey, things are a mess,” Court admitted. She couldn’t possibly know what was coursing through Erin’s mind, but Erin wasn’t in a sharing mood. She didn’t want to drag her sister into her cesspool of guilt. “We all know that. But we’re just a handful of folks who are doing well to feed ourselves. We’re not gonna storm Buinet or any other place and start tossing settlers into cells. The problem here is systematic. We need allies and plans.”
“Like Esteben’s idea to engage all those engineers,” Erin muttered.
“Exactly. We have to be smart because we don’t have power. We have to be patient and calculating.”
“I just want things to be better.”
“What are you feeling guilty about?” Brenna asked. “What happened here isn’t your fault.”
“I know. But, still.”
Still, Erin thought about what could have been. She thought of what the people of Jekh could have had if all the progress they’d made as hybrid refugees on that planet hadn’t been ripped away from them.
She understood that there were few women for the men of the planet to mate with, but she knew that if they’d had options, Erin wouldn’t have been Headron’s first choice, much less Esteben’s.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Eileen looked at one of several viewscreens on the pilot console of Reg’s Beauty and watched the planet Jekh grow smaller and smaller behind them. Salehi was reserving high speeds for after they’d cleared the system. He estimated that a ship of that class would require another half day before he could make the attempt.
“You know, back when I was a kid and used to sneak out of the house after curfew,” she said, “I could never really take a deep breath until after I’d gotten out of the area. No matter how quiet I was getting out of the house, I worried my ma would be on my tail ready to grab me by the collar and drag me home. That’s how I’m feeling right now.”
Salehi grinned, reached across the console, and tapped the view button on her screen. The screen darkened. “You’ll drive yourself nuts.”
“I can’t help myself.”
Eileen needed something to do.
Ais had curled into a ball on top of a bunk and had been asleep for about four hours, so Eileen didn’t even have her to fret over. Ais had been anxious and agitated, and Eileen had thought it was best to let her rest. They had plenty of time to interrogate her about where she’d come from and what she was. The longer Eileen had looked at Ais, the less sure she’d been. For one thing, she was tiny, and Eileen had decided that malnutrition probably wasn’t to blame. For another, she didn’t have all the red trademarks of a Tyneali-human hybrid. She looked an experimental step beyond that stage—human-plus. Dark-haired with olive skin with orangey undertones. Her eyes were red, though. The Tyneali hadn’t been able to breed that out of her.
“Did you sneak out much as a teenager?” Salehi asked.
Eileen scoffed, put her booted feet up on the deactivated console, and crossed her legs at the ankles. “Oh, yeah. We had that whole ‘early to bed, early to rise’ thing going on. I always had a ton of chores, and had to be up before the sun on most days. Made having anything resembling a social life impossible.”
“Your mother prevented you from going out?”
“She tried. I mean, I don’t want to make her sound like an ogre. She wasn’t like that at all. Momma was a tough cookie, for sure, and I think she just knew me too well. She always said that I was a lot like she was, and that she knew what I was going to do long before I ever made a single move. I had to try to get out, anyway.”
“She caught you?”
“Of course. She wasn’t the kind of lady who’d shame me, though. She wouldn’t drive out to someplace and holler at me while she chased me home. She’d just be waiting on the porch when I got back, and she’d be wearing that disapproving look on her face.” Southern mothers did disapproval better than anyone, in Eileen’s opinion.
He chuckled and pulled up a screen displaying space conditions in the flight segment ahead. “I know that look. My parents had their own versions.”
“Yeah? I don’t believe you. I bet you were the kind of kid who never got into any good trouble beyond putting empty juice bottles back into the refrigerator.”
“What makes you think that?” He minimized the screen and input some flight corrections in another.
The guy knew what he was doing. Why she was so shocked by that, she could only ascribe to the fact that none of the pilots she’d worked with in the past five years knew how to do much more than launch, land, and activate autopilot. They didn’t need degrees for what they did, or even much experience—just the right social connections.
That ain’t right.
“Well?” he asked, obviously because she hadn’t responded.
She always got a little stupid when she was talking to him.
Do better, cowgirl.
She sighed. “Maybe you just have that look about you,” she said. “Overachiever. Never did anything wrong.”
“Maybe I didn’t. That doesn’t mean the fear of failure was any less. I did occasionally disappoint my parents, I’ll have you know. This isn’t the job they saw me doing.”
“What’d they want you to do?”
“The usual sorts of things immigrants in a wealthy country want their children to go to school for. Medicine. Law. Engineering, at the very least. Of course, there was the issue of who was going to pay for that glorious education, right? Two years in community college before transferring to a local university wasn’t good enough for them. They wanted top tier from the start.” He gave her an eloquent look.
“Didn’t have top-tier money, huh?”
“Bingo. There was no money at all. My parents did, and still do, own a little Middle Eastern restaurant that does okay business most months, but I had no college fund or any money saved. I worked at the restaurant when I was a kid, when I wasn’t busy studying. My parents didn’t pay me for working there.”
“Of course not. My mother didn’t pay me for shoveling all that cow shit, either.”
He hooked up a triumphant brow. “See? Anyhow, scholarship prospects at my school of choice weren’t promising.”
“Yeah. I knew lots of folks who went into the service to get their tuition covered. I don’t think any of them ended up on Jekh, though. Or if they have, I sure haven’t seen them.”
“I’m not sure who’s luckier.” Salehi stretched his arms over his head and cracked his back. “The choices are being complicit in the big mess out here or being cluelessly judgmental back on Earth.”
“I dunno.” Eileen pulled her gaze away from the exposed bit of skin between the bottom of Salehi’s shirt and the waistband of his cargo pants. Rock-hard abs, and not even a smidge of fat to pinch. He kept in damn good shape for a middle-aged dude. From what she’d witnessed, most of the men who worked for the police didn’t bother once they got comfortable on Jekh.
Avert your eyes, cowgirl, or the stupid’ll come back.
She looked out the window at the field of stars ahead. She didn’t know the names of any in that part of space, but that didn’t matter. The ship’s computer knew them all, and probably Salehi knew a few by sight, too. Where she’d grown up, folks hadn’t had much use for secondary education. While she’d known plenty of people with street smarts—and she liked to consider herself part of that group—she’d never rubbed elbows with anyone quite like Salehi.
Of course she was obsessed.
Suddenly nervous, she cleared her throat and patted down her hair. “I…think folks on Earth know a little more now than they did a year ago,” she said. “Brenna’s been se
nding all kinds of files to her mother, and her mother is the kind of lady who’s pissed off enough to staple the news onto every electric pole in town if she thinks doing so will shame her ex-husband. Owen’s been sending lots of stuff, too. Even my mother was asking me what the hell was going on with all the Jekhan women. Folks on Earth can’t ignore the whispers anymore. They’re starting to get legitimate news coverage about the mess now. Everything was filtered before.”
“Yes. I was already halfway to Jekh with my squadron when I learned about the Tyneali and that the Jekhans are hybrids. Imagine being shipped out to a distant planet to do intervention on a war that was never going to happen in the first place, and then to be unable to question your orders because everything was moving too fast.”
“You deserted at first opportunity, didn’t you?”
He shrugged. Stood. Leaned in the doorway at the back of the cockpit and looked over his shoulder into the hallway. “I tried my damnedest to, Eileen. I’d estimate that about a quarter of the invasion force deserted. I don’t know where they all went. Some that had access to the incursion ships may have retreated into space and drifted for a while before setting a course to Earth. Some may have scattered into the wilderness on Jekh or into villages like Little Gitano.”
“That was what you tried to do, wasn’t it? Go to Little Gitano?”
“Yeah. A partner, Escobar, and I got drafted at the last minute to stay behind, but we couldn’t tell our friends why. We just pulled away and let them go.”
“Got drafted by the commissioner, you mean.”
“Lillian. Yes. I guess she saw something in us she thought she could use.” He looked at her and pointed to the corridor. “Hungry?”
“Starving.”
“No need to keep close watch over the console. We should have several hours of incident-free flying ahead. Further, I’ve got the computer programmed to notify my wrist COM if there are any disturbances.”
“Oh. Okay, then.” Eileen dropped her feet and stood. “Where exactly is Owen McGarry being held, anyway?”
Salehi tilted his head toward the galley again.
Eileen held her breath as she passed him. He smelled too damned good, and she didn’t know how long she’d be able to keep her thoughts from going to a decidedly unprofessional place. Given their close proximity, she wouldn’t be able to avoid him for long and the whole ship was going to start smelling like him.
Ugh.
She rolled her eyes at herself as she pulled open the door of the refrigeration unit. Salehi had brought provisions, so they didn’t have to rely on Reg’s leftovers. She pulled out quick-cook pasta and a packet of sauce.
Salehi grabbed a couple of pots from the hanger overhead. “The Tyneali have a number of abandoned outposts they left a great deal of technology behind at. They tend to be flighty that way.” He handed her the larger of two pots, which she then filled with water from the dispenser.
She tasted the water before salting it. Water on ships tended to be constantly recycled, and she was used to the stale taste, but sometimes ship owners would cheap out on the filtration systems. The good ones used a lot of energy and some folks didn’t want to spend the money on fuel.
“Clean enough,” she muttered, and then said to Salehi, “They just leave their stuff behind for whomever to take?”
“As I said, they tend to be mercurial.”
“You’ve met some, then?”
He nodded and emptied the contents of the sauce packet into the smaller pot. That stuff could barely be considered spaghetti sauce, but the paste was typical fare for long-haul trips where passengers wouldn’t be put into stasis. When Eileen was working, she tended to doctor up the stuff coming out of the packs, but she didn’t see any garlic, onion, or peppers to work with. She squinted at the dried seasonings over the stove, though, and tried to make out the labels. They were all greasy.
“Lillian keeps interesting company,” Salehi said. “She’s networked a little better than most people in Buinet.”
“She knows things she shouldn’t, you mean.”
“I think that’s a fair assessment. The particular post we’re heading toward hadn’t yet been discovered by any other space-faring species at the time Lillian’s friends took over. The Tyneali know they’re there. Occasionally, they stop by with some supplies and I guess to see what the new occupants have done with the technology they left behind. They’re a very curious race. To them, everyone’s a potential lab specimen. I guess they got bored with experimenting on themselves and so they moved on to other races.”
“Curious and vain. How many hybrid species do they have seeded across this galaxy?”
Salehi shook his head as he rooted through what appeared to be the utensil drawer. “No way of knowing. Of course, I’ve heard about a few of the others, but I’ve never encountered them myself. They trade in the region, but their home planets are situated far from here. I don’t believe the Tyneali like for their experiments to interact. Muddies the results, I suppose.”
“But they’ve more or less abandoned the…” She made a rolling hand gesture as she considered her word choices. There was really no tact way to state it. “The Jekh project. They weren’t robust enough, so they left them. No more breeder stock. They just left them to do the survival of the fittest thing, but the Jekhans were already doomed to fail. Human and Tyneali mating practices are just too dissimilar.”
“I think they went too far when they adjusted the frequency of female births,” he said. He found the black pepper that she hadn’t been able to see and sprinkled some into the garish, too-red sauce base. “Tyneali birth rate is about two males to every female. They adjusted the Jekhan rate to about the same, and that was a mistake. The female infants turned out to be far less viable because of all the other genetic manipulation, I suppose, and then grouping was too hard for some people. Finding suitable trios was literally a matter of life or death for the men.”
“And of course, no woman really wants to stick around in a relationship she’s only in because she’s doing the guys a favor. That just sucks.”
The water came to a quick, hard boil. Eileen dropped the pasta into the pot.
“There’s nothing to be done for them now,” Salehi said. “Perhaps with enough human genetic influence, the trio requirement will be bred out in time.”
“That’s your solution? For Jekhans to reintegrate into the human gene pool?”
“I admit the solution isn’t perfect, but I think reintegration is better than those people having no legacy at all.”
Deep down, Eileen knew he was right, but she still didn’t feel good about the circumstances. No one on Earth had asked the Tyneali to abduct them and experiment on them. The hybrids born of their intervention had been getting by the best they could with the deficiencies they had, and had made a culture out of them. They weren’t Tyneali enough to thrive, so of course they’d gone to Earth looking to reconnect. They didn’t have a choice, but Eileen wondered if they would have been better off just keeping to themselves. Their population had been decimated starting with that act of connection.
“Maybe they don’t have to reintegrate.” She poked the noodles with a slotted spoon.
“Pardon?”
“I wouldn’t, if I were them. I wouldn’t integrate. They’ll disappear that way. They should stay put and let folks come to them.”
“Let them control the flow of newcomers, you mean.”
“Yeah. And if I were them, I’d be real fuckin’ picky about who gets to stay.”
Salehi chuckled and pulled out a chair from the table. He sat, grinning at her and shaking his head.
“What?”
“Nothing. You’re just sounding like Lillian now.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“You should. She’s one of the smartest and most righteous people I know. There are far worse people to be compared to. The longer I stay on Jekh, the more of them I meet.”
Eileen studied her ragged fingernails. “We�
�ll have to get rid of them, too.”
“You’ve got ideas on how to do that?”
“Nah, but give me some time. I’m good at getting rid of folks. I’ve never had a boyfriend come back once he got the boot and I can empty out a house party in less than three minutes. I’ll think of something.”
He spread that grin onto his face again, and she melted a little on the inside. “I can’t wait to hear what you come up with.”
She raked a hand through her gnarly ponytail and pinned her gaze onto the dirty floor. “Well, Salehi, you’ll be the first to know when I think of it.”
“Edgar.”
“Hmm?”
“If we’re going to be friends, you should call me Edgar.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
When the rain finally began to slow, Headron breathed a sigh of relief. He was desperate to get back to his usual routines and his usual bed partner. He would have never imagined that a woman could be so elusive when confined within an enclosed space, but he went entire days without seeing Erin. Whenever he queried where she was, he’d learn that she was using quiet pockets in the storm to go out and install more sensor wires on the fence, or that she’d gone out to patrol the unsecured borders. She wasn’t going to let any opportunist slip by on her watch, apparently.
But she needn’t have been so vigilant. Owen was out patrolling the perimeter every day along with Herris and the farmhands who were desperate for fresh air.
Headron couldn’t help but to feel a bit ignored, so when she hustled through the oven room’s door at lunchtime, he hid in the shadows beside a baker’s rack and waited for her to heel off her muddy boots.
When she tried to pass him, he hooked an arm around her waist and pulled her against him.
“Shit!” She clutched her chest and let out a tittering breath. “Man, make some noise or something next time so I know you’re there.”