by Sara King
Milar had a look of total concentration, seeming to be waiting for something. Tatiana started picking sap from underneath her fingernails, lodged there from catching herself on one of the disgustingly sticky Fortuna tree trunks.
“Shit!” Milar hissed suddenly. He grabbed her almost violently and started tugging her up the hill, pointing his gun in the general direction of the trees and firing seemingly at random, except that people screamed. Tatiana, who was small, barefoot, and had twenty percent of her muscle power impeded by nodes, couldn’t keep up. Just as she was about to start kicking him in the shin for dragging her, Milar stooped and threw her over his shoulder. Then they were running, and Tatiana felt sticky wet foliage slapping against her legs and ass. She was about to complain, loudly, when the brush behind them exploded in a heat-wave that made Milar stumble. Like someone was whispering in her ear, Tatiana heard, Damn, think I missed.
“He’s to the south!” Tatiana cried, lifting her head from the brute’s back to find their would-be grenadier in the foliage behind them.
Milar spun and, like muscle-bound clockwork, pulled the trigger once, made the man huddling in the bushes scream, pulled it again, and the screaming stopped.
They stopped moving. Got them.
“Milar!” Tatiana cried, trying to twist to look. “There’s one behind—”
Another grenade hit the brush behind them, and this time, it did knock Milar over. It was followed closely by two more. They went sprawling into the shrubbery and Tatiana screamed, rolling over and over through the sticky alien plant life, knocking elbows and ankles against the hard alien root systems.
The big colonist was at her side in a second, pulling her back to her feet. “Come on!” he cried. “Let’s go.”
Somewhat guiltily, Tatiana realized that, had he not been burdened by a four-foot-eleven cyborg, Milar could have escaped already. This was his home, where he grew up, his own backyard. He could run circles around the Coalition forces trying to pin him down—if she weren’t slowing him down.
“Just go on without me,” Tatiana panted. “There’s too many of them, and I’m the one they want.”
Milar, who had been scanning the forest beyond his weapon with the acuity of a predator, slowly turned to give her a look like she’d said the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. He growled something that sounded like, ‘you’re gonna piss me off’, yanked her off her feet, and charged back into the icky jungle like a dick-jiggling Tarzonian.
“Man, this day just keeps going from bad to worse,” Tatiana muttered, as she stumbled as quickly as she could behind him. “Can’t you call your brother or something?”
“Patty’s in Silver City and they blew up our comm equipment,” Milar said. “They’ve got your soldier under guard. We’ll have to make do with a wreck somewhere along the way, call for backup that way. Now shhh.”
“You mean we can’t go back to my soldier?” Tatiana gasped, horrified, thinking of the nice, clean jumpsuit that had been tucked in its storage compartment.
“Yeah,” Milar said. “But it’s okay, we can find supplies elsewhere. Just stop talking.”
Stop talking. What was she, a trained parrot? Tatiana snorted. “I’ve been in wartime situations before, Miles. I know all there is to know about this shit.”
Milar squinted. Then, grandiosely, he gestured ahead of them. “Then by all means. Lead on, Captain Eyre. Show me how it’s done.”
Tatiana straightened and started marching ahead, automatically starting to calculate topography layout for launch-points, civilian obstacles, and sizeable cover—then realized she was thinking in terms of an eighty ton machine and stumbled to a halt.
“Yeah, thought so,” Milar snorted. “Let’s go. Keep quiet.”
Suddenly, the severity of the situation smacked her in the face. Without her soldier, she didn’t even have a basic ration pack. Which meant…she didn’t have wet wipes! “We don’t have anything to eat.” She eyed the alien forest around her in growing panic. “And how do I go to the bathroom?”
Stop panicking, Milar’s sexy mind-voice told her. It hurts my head. He was shooting at things again.
Tatiana immediately scowled at the insinuation. I am a war-hardened combat vet who saw both the battle at Sunwash Valley and the battle at Blacksands Mobile Facility. Nobody’s panicking. But then she started thinking about what it would be like to go without clothes in the woods on an alien planet with nobody but a collie to watch her back while being hunted by trained killers and her heart began to hammer.
“Think of sunshine and ducklings, sweetie,” Milar said, wincing, still pulling the trigger at the bushes.
“What the hell is a duckling?” Tatiana demanded. Then she remembered the thing in her forehead, and how a demented child had told her she’d have to charge it with sunlight or die. She started to hyperventilate.
“It’s a big, muscular, scaly, utterly brutal killing machine that’s going to punch you in the face if you don’t stop panicking and trying to give the whole Tear the Wide. Now shhhhh. They’re gonna find us again if you don’t shut your midget piehole.” He glanced out at the trees around them, seeming to watch things move that Tatiana couldn’t see.
But Tatiana narrowed her eyes at him, her bathroom break sans wet-wipes forgotten. “Midget?” Raising her voice in irritation, she said, “I dare you, knucker.” She tapped her chin with a finger. “C’mon! Think the midget can’t take it? Punch me!”
“Dammit, Tat!” Milar hissed. “Shhh!”
“You’d punch me. Really.” She laughed derisively. “Yeah, right.”
“Shit, they found our trail,” Milar said, ducking low behind a gnarly root system to hide from whatever was below. “Please stop talking.”
“You mean shut my hole?” Tatiana sneered. “Whatcha gonna do, big guy, take a swing at a four-foot-eleven midget…”
Milar spun around and punched her in the face.
Tatiana awakened to a metallic shink, shink, shink. She was on her back on the cold, rocky ground, facing the brilliant silver half-circle of the Void Ring beyond the dense jungle canopy. Her eyes narrowed. “You punched me.”
“Yup,” Milar said. He was playing with his knife again, sharpening it this time. Every inch of his body—skin and clothes—was covered in random stripes of a heat-absorbent gel. So was, she noticed, hers.
“You punched me.” Tatiana sat up, pissed. Sure, her patrolling bots had taken care of the resulting mess so it didn’t even hurt, but that wasn’t the point. She slapped the blanket beside her leg. “Apologize!”
Milar blew rock dust off his blade, then looked at her over it. He had, she noticed, given himself stitches as she slept. Lots of them. Even then, the bush he’d torn apart for its fibrous strands lay in a deconstructed mass nearby, the crude needle he’d made from a twisted piece of wire stuck into the log beside his thigh. Tatiana didn’t remember him having that many holes in him when he punched her. And now, come to think of it, she hadn’t been wearing a jumpsuit or nice warm overshirt when he’d punched her, either…
“You do realize,” Milar said, “that I just spent the last eight hours in a cat-and-mouse with an entire regiment of Coalition troops because you couldn’t keep your mouth shut.” He twisted the blade in the filtered starlight, then started rubbing the stone against the razor edge again.
A whole regiment? Tatiana was impressed. “Don’t they have snipers?”
“Yep.” He gestured idly with the blade at three shiny new sniper rifles leaned up against the log beside him, right behind the massive pile of guns. Like, at least fifty of them. Fancy ones she had never seen before, probably from special forces. He was also wearing someone else’s black combat pants, with weapons and grenades strapped to every conceivable location on his body.
“Oh.” Tatiana swallowed. “Uh. You carried me around for all that?”
“Yep.” Shink. Shink. Shink…
“You really are a badass, aren’t you?” she cried, delighted.
He raised an eyebrow at he
r. As confident as a big cat.
“Sweet!” Tatiana shrieked, getting up to go look at the exotic guns. “Can I have one? That would look so cool on my hip.”
“No.”
Tatiana paused in reaching down, then picked one up anyway. “Why not?” She started giving it an enthusiastic examination, finger on the trigger.
“Because,” Milar said as she squinted down the barrel at hypothetical baddies, “Nephyrs use infrared technology to see weapons-fire.”
Tatiana considered that for a split second before an accidental beam from her gun took out a nearby tree, neatly searing the trunk in half. Tatiana’s arm lowered and her mouth fell open as the two-hundred-foot giant groaned and crashed to the jungle floor, pulling vines free and splattering sap everywhere in its wake.
Milar continued to make love to his blade, watching her with narrowed amber eyes.
Clearing her throat embarrassedly, Tatiana put the gun back on the pile.
He proceeded to watch her like he was waiting for something. “So are you going to thank me?”
Tatiana jerked away from the fallen tree. “What, for punching me?” she cried, outraged at the very idea.
“Yes. For punching you,” he growled. Shink. Shink. “And for carrying you.” Shink. “And for hiding your body in the bushes while I used myself as bait to lure the bad guys with guns away from you.” Shink. “And for utterly destroying an entire regiment while you slept it off, taking six bullets, two laser swipes, eight pieces of shrapnel, and a goddamn branch through my leg in doing it.”
She squinted at his leg. “Really? A branch? What’d you do, fall out of a tree?”
“No, I fell off a mountain wrestling with a sniper.”
“Oh, is that all?” She snorted. “Give me back my soldier and I could’ve taken them all out in like two minutes.”
“Your soldier,” shink, “is forty feet tall.”
“Thirty-eight,” Tatiana corrected. “And I’m one of the only people on the planet capable of operating it.” Which reminded her. She frowned and looked around. “Where is our pickup?”
He gave her a flat stare. Shink. Shink. “Couldn’t find any comm equipment. Had to take us further north to avoid the search parties.” Shink. “Coalers are boiling around that soldier of yours like ants.”
“They won’t get far,” Tatiana said. “I put lockdown codes on it while your virgin ass was passed out from all that great sex.”
Milar fumbled a stroke and cut himself. He stuck his thumb in his mouth and glared at her over it.
Tatiana decided to press her advantage. “You know, generally when a guy hits a girl engaged in a long-term relationship with him, especially a girl who just blew his mind with the best—only—sex of his life, that’s considered assault and battery.”
Milar narrowed his eyes.
“Generally, men like that end up mopping floors and bending over for Bubba in prison,” Tatiana continued.
Milar lowered the wounded digit from his mouth and got off his log. Seeing him stretch out to his full height over her, Tatiana felt a little thrill. “Physical abuse is unfortunately very common in the civilian sector,” she continued solemnly. “It’s part of my job description to report it whenever I see it.”
“Is it.” He shoved his knife into its sheath and crossed his arms over his formidable pecs.
“Definitely,” Tatiana said, soaking up the slab of sheer hunk in front of her. “Mine. I mean my. Definitely my.” She shook herself. “My job.”
“Yours, huh?”
“Mmmmm-hmmm,” she said, taking in the flexing dragons over his chest, broken only by the strap of an assault rifle, the sexy gleam of sweat glistening in the silvery light of the alien Void Ring hanging in the sky above. God damn that was hot. She’d seen stuff like that in her teaser mags, but sweet Aanaho, it was so much better up close. Then she realized she’d been staring, and that Milar was still peering at her with the focus of a panther. She blinked up at his face. “Huh?”
“You were saying,” Milar told her, shifting his big body, “how I was gonna end up bending over for Bubba.”
Tatiana frowned, utterly distracted by the way his big thighs were straining against the tight Coalition sniper uniform. “I was?”
Milar’s rugged jaw stretched in a grin, amusement sparkling in his honey-brown eyes. “Pretty sure you were.”
“Uh…” Eyes dropping back to his torso, Tatiana struggled to remember who Bubba was. “I guess if that’s your thing…”
Milar rumbled a growl and surged forward, sweeping her up in a powerful kiss. “Oh I remember now,” Tatiana managed around his passionate lips. “We were talking about how you were going to start a vicious cycle by thoroughly making it up to me for punching me in the face earlier when I totally didn’t deserve it because you called me a midget and wouldn’t take it back.” Rumbling, Milar dragged her to the blanket he’d laid out beside the gun pile, and Tatiana giggled at the idea of another carnal epic in the making. They were just getting to the good part—her jumpsuit was most of the way off and Milar was trailing his lips downward and fumbling with his pants—when one of their pursuers stumbled from the trees, looking lost. The man blinked down at their guns, then at them, still entwined on the bedroll Milar had confiscated from one of the coalers he’d killed. There was a blink of confusion on his young face right before Milar put a round through his forehead.
Tatiana grimaced and unlocked her legs from around Milar’s torso as the dead guy collapsed by her bed, his body bleeding and shuddering in the alien grasses. “You brought a gun to bed?” she cried, inching away from the body. “That’s…ew! Men!”
Milar let out a frustrated rumble, kissed her again, but then began buttoning up his pants. “We’ll finish this later, coaler,” he promised. Then he was snatching up guns and ammo and throwing sacks and duffels over his shoulder, all business again. Tatiana felt a stab of loss and wondered if maybe she could convince him to finish up real quick-like.
“Until then,” Milar rumbled, “we need to get further into the Tear. We can make it in a couple hours, if you can keep pace. Should be able to find a safe spot and hole up. Guys’ll think twice about following us in there.”
Tatiana made a frustrated sound and slammed herself back to the blanket. “Are you really going to stop because some dude just walked out of the trees? He was obviously lost. We have time.”
“We’re leaving. Now.” Milar shoved a big rifle at her. “You carry that.”
“Oh reeeaally,” Tatiana whistled, immediately interested. She zipped up the jumpsuit, pulled the warmer overshirt back on, and grabbed the gun he’d given her, standing. It was heavy. Thrilled, she peered through the enormous scope, trying it out. She saw nothing but the individual resin-globs of a tree-trunk. “So lemme guess, you’re gonna put me on a lookout to watch your back while you take them out in bloody single-handed combat.” The thrill of that thought had her horny all over again.
“No,” Milar said, “I want you to carry my gear.”
Tatiana narrowed her eyes and pulled her head away from the scope. “You’re teaching me how to use a gun, you know.”
Milar snorted with total amusement and threw a few dozen grenades into a sack on his belt.
“You are!” Tatiana stomped her foot. Then, eying a cool-looking one on his hip, she pointed and said, “That gun.”
“You fly ships,” Milar said, dropping more gear into her hands. “I stab people in the neck. Different skillset. Besides, that’s my Laserat. You’re not getting one of my Laserats. Can you carry all that?”
Tatiana grimaced and looked down at the instruments of death he had arrayed in her arms. “Man, I dunno…”
“Good,” Milar said, “let’s go.” He started off into the forest at Speed of Thug, approximately two thousand kilos of gear weighing him down.
Tatiana scrunched her nose in disgust, but then reluctantly followed him when she realized he wasn’t coming back. “So, uh, Milar?” she asked, keeping as close behind h
im as possible with the massive combat boots he’d strapped to her feet. “Why would they think twice about following us in here?”
“People go missing in the North Tear,” Milar said.
Tatiana rolled her eyes at another quaint colonist myth. “I heard about that. Search teams vanishing, yada yada. Yeah, so what, the Boogeyman lives in the caves or something?”
“Something like,” Milar said, sounding totally serious.
Tatiana frowned. “Really? The Boogeyman?”
“Not sure what it is,” Milar said, “but it kills people.”
“Sleep apnea kills people,” Tatiana said. “Did you know you snore after a good lay?”
“…and then dismantles and hides their corpses from search parties. Only blood left from the attack—blood everywhere—at least, that’s what the search parties that made it back alive said. No one really wanted to go back. The one grainy bit of footage they got of the attacks showed nothing except bodies getting ripped apart by something invisible, kind of like a cow put through a wood chipper.”
Tatiana made a nervous laugh. “Uh. You almost sound serious.”
“I am serious.” He continued stalking ahead of her like a predator.
“And we’re going that way why?”
“Because there are almost two thousand men combing the jungle behind us, trying to find our trail, and I’m struggling with exhaustion and blood loss and I’d rather take my chances with invisible shit than Nephyrs,” Milar said. “Sooner or later, they’re gonna send Nephyrs, and I am not equipped to deal with Nephyrs. You need EMP grenades or nuclear warheads to kill Nephyrs.”
“Uh,” Tatiana said. “Did you say invisible?”
Milar didn’t answer her.
“No, seriously,” Tatiana said, catching up to him and grabbing the belt he’d secured around his trim hips, “did you say ‘invisible stuff that rips people apart and spreads blood everywhere?’”