Depths of Blue

by Lisa MacTague

  Orthodoxans! Torrin instinctively flattened herself as far as she could until she literally hugged the ground. It was a little ridiculous, she told herself. There was no way they could see her over the hilltop, but she couldn’t help herself.

  “So what’s the plan?” she asked.

  “I don’t have enough intel to make a plan.” Jak shook his head. “Without knowing how many we’re up against, we’re screwed.”

  He crouched and made his way down the hill, motioning for her to follow. The further they got from the hill’s crest, the more Torrin’s nervousness eased. The cold hand that had reached inside her chest at Jak’s words slowly loosened its grasp around her heart. There wasn’t much she was afraid of, but her encounter with the Orthodoxans, especially the last part with Hutchinson, had unnerved her more than she’d realized.

  “So, you must have some idea of what we should be doing,” Torrin prompted when they stopped at the bottom of the hill.

  “I don’t like it, but we need to take the time to find out how many of them there are. Here.” Jak pulled a rifle scope out of one of his jacket pockets. “Try not to lose this one.”

  “How many of those do you need, exactly?” Torrin chose to ignore his dig.

  “I use different ones for different distances. Trying to use a long distance one for short or medium distances is pointless.”

  “They make digital ones, you know. Those can handle varying ranges. I’m sure I can get hold of some for you. And the Devonites, of course.”

  Jak shrugged. “I’m fine with these. It’s not smart to rely too much on digital equipment out here. If it stops working and you don’t have a backup, you’re in big trouble.” A spasm of pain crossed his face. “Trouble gets you killed.”

  “Bron?” Torrin laid a hand across the back of his. He nodded.

  “He preferred a cloak device to the ghillie suit I like. His projector developed a glitch that caused a slight ripple in the air. It’s not unusual with cloaks and the Orthodoxans have obviously been trained to look for it.” He closed his eyes and put his other hand over hers. “He took a sniper’s bullet in the throat.”

  Torrin grimaced but said nothing. Jak’s hand gripped hers hard enough to hurt, but he looked like he was about to cry. She really wanted to throw her arms around him and hold him, but she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to stop herself from going further. The past few nights of close proximity had done nothing to blunt the attraction she felt for this man. It was an attraction that she shouldn’t feel, didn’t want to feel, but she couldn’t help coming back for more.

  She must have made a noise because Jak opened his eyes and looked down at their hands. He let go of her hand with alacrity, almost throwing himself backward.

  “Sorry,” he muttered, face pink.

  “It’s okay. If you need to talk, I’m here. Remember, I know a little something about losing someone.”

  “Sure, sure,” he said. He was dismissing her, she was sure of it.

  “Hey, I mean it. Talking about it can really help. Have you talked to anyone about it since it happened?”

  “There’s no point in talking about it. Actions count for more than words, especially out here.” He looked at her, and she stepped back at the dead look behind his eyes. The warm blue eyes shouldn’t have been capable of looking so cold. It was clear he thought he didn’t have anything to live for. Unless…

  “You’re trying to find him,” Torrin accused. “You want to find the man who killed your brother and take him out.”

  “So what if I am? No one has as much right as I do. My brother isn’t the first one he took from me.”

  Torrin rocked back on her heels at the revelation. “What? Really? How do you…”

  “We don’t have time for this,” Jak cut her off midsentence. Torrin sat there with her mouth agape for a moment, then snapped her jaws shut.

  “You’re right,” she said. But don’t think I’m going to let that one lie, she thought. There are so many layers of wrong happening here.

  He looked at her, eyes flat. “I know you won’t drop it. I wish you would. We have bigger fish to fry right now.”

  “I said you were right.”

  “I need you to go back up the hill and watch the closest tollhouse. Try to count how many of them are in there and see when their shift change happens.”

  “I can do that. Where are you going to be?” She hoped she didn’t sound too worried.

  “I’m going to see if I can find a better line of sight across the river. I’ll be doing the same thing. Make sure you stay down. If you stand up at the top of the hill, anyone looking over will see you silhouetted against the sky.”

  “Got it.” Torrin stood up, crouching. He reached out and grabbed her wrist.

  “We have no communication devices, so meet me back here in a couple of hours.” He pointed at a point in the sky not far above the horizon. “When the sun gets past that point, come back down.”

  “Okay,” she said, impatient to get started. She tried to get her arm back from him, but he tightened his grip and pulled her back down half a step. Surprised, she looked at him. He looked unsure and chewed on his lower lip.

  “I really shouldn’t do this.” He let go of her hand and undid his belt, sliding it out of the loops in his pants.

  “Ummm, what are you doing?” She looked at him askance. What was he thinking by taking off his pants?

  “You’re the one who’s been on my back for a weapon. Do you want my pistol or not?” His voice was peevish.

  “Oh.” That made more sense than him taking his pants off, but the men on this planet had some seriously messed up priorities. No one could blame her for jumping to the wrong conclusion. At that moment, she was struck by just how far outside her comfort zone she was. While she was no stranger to conflict, she hadn’t been a soldier in a very long time. She had no hard feelings for the military. She’d known more than one soldier and not a few of them intimately. She’d been one herself, if only for a short time. Actually, when she thought about it, she seemed to have a propensity for military lovers. Maybe that was why she was so drawn to Jak. But this wasn’t her milieu. She was a negotiator. She loved to wheel and deal, to get the best bargain for herself and her people. There was no way to bargain her way out of this position. Her whole world had been turned upside down, and there would be no way to right it until she got off this hellish planet. It was a pity that a world this beautiful was rotting like fruit on the vine.

  “Here,” Jak said, and she started, coming back to the present. She took the pistol from him and clipped it to her waist. Fortunately the holster went on much like the one she’d had for her plasma pistol. The holster was oily leather and unrelieved black. There was a flap over the top that stopped her from getting at the gun.

  Jak reached over. “You open it up here.” He pressed on a point part of the way down the holster and the top popped open. Torrin felt at the spot he’d pressed on and could feel a slightly raised nub. She pressed the spot back into the holster, and it clicked closed. When she ran her fingers over it again, it popped back open.

  “Have you ever used a weapon like this?” Jak asked. She shook her head, and he reached into the holster, pulling out the pistol.

  “Here’s the trigger,” he started.

  “I’m not a complete neophyte,” Torrin interrupted, somewhat irritated by his assumption. “I’ve just never used an explosive-based propulsion weapon before.”

  He nodded. “The safety is here. Make sure you engage it before you holster the pistol. When it’s flipped up, the safety is off and you can fire. Now this is just a pistol, but it’s a powerful one and the recoil is a bitch.”

  Torrin cleared her throat at the pejorative term.

  “Sorry. The recoil’s a pain in the ass, kind of like you.” He grinned at her. “Is that better?”

  She glared at him through narrowed eyes. He was trying to convince her that the fragile, haunted man was gone. She knew when someone was shining her on. He grin
ned and he joked, but the dead look still lingered in his eyes.

  “I guess not.” He shrugged. “Just remember that this is going to kick back and plan for it. You need to resight your next shot or it’s going to go high and wide. If we had some time, I would have you take some practice shots, but we don’t need to let the Orthodoxans know we’re here.”

  Torrin turned the pistol over in her hands, running her fingers over it, familiarizing herself with the shape and weight of the weapon. Jak pulled a couple of magazines out of one of his pants pockets. He reached over and took one of her hands off the gun and placed it along the top.

  “Feel the slide there?” He pressed her hand down on it. “Pull that back to pop the magazine out. It’ll engage when you pull it all the way back. Then take one of these and replace the empty one.” Demonstrating, he pulled her hand back and the slide released the ammunition clip. It fell to the ground, where he picked it up and handed it back to her. “Put it back in. You’ll have to really slam it in there to get it to catch.”

  As usual, his touch on her skin awoke conflicting feelings within her. She didn’t know if it was because they were about to head into a potential combat situation, but she was very aroused. If he’d been female and they hadn’t been on the other side of a hill from who knew how many enemy combatants, she would have jumped him. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been this turned on. The warmth in the pit of her stomach and her loins was so intense that it was almost painful. If she’d been alone, she could have brought herself some relief, but she couldn’t think of a more inappropriate time for that.

  She took the clip and fumbled it back into the gun. Her hands were less than dexterous, and she almost dropped the clip back into the grass. It took her three tries to slam the clip home.

  “I’ve never done this before,” she explained, trying to cover for her sudden clumsiness.

  “Here, I’ll help you through it.” Jak reached for her hands.

  “No!” He looked a little hurt at the strength of her denial. “I can get this. Just let me run through it.” She didn’t want his hands on her again. His touch completely clouded her ability to think and function. Without his help, she ran through the motions with confidence and was able to get it down.

  “I’ll head around the hill that way,” Jak said, pointing to his left. “Fire the pistol three times in a row if you get made. I’ll make sure that I have a line on you wherever I set up.”

  She nodded and started back up the hill, holstering the pistol. He had a line on her thoughts, and she needed to get away from him. The more time she spent with him, the harder it was to keep her hands to herself. When she got back to Nadierzda, she was going to tumble the first available and willing woman. Apparently she’d gone way too long without a good romp. And now here she was, heading up a hill into a life-or-death situation where she would be facing off against men with rifles while she had only a little pistol and a scope. Her priorities were messed up. She could easily die here, and all she could think about was sex. She sighed and pushed on toward the hill’s crest.

  Chapter Eleven

  Torrin crawled the last few meters to the top of the hill and lay prone, her head barely cresting the top. As soon as she saw the small outpost, her rambling thoughts sharpened. She pulled out the scope Jak had given her and trained it on the structures below. There was one man in the small building by the road. Craning her head, she took a look at the sun to gauge how much time she had left. She checked out the rest of the area. There were no other Orthodoxans in evidence, but the biggest building looked big enough to house a dozen men. She really hoped that wasn’t the case and wished she knew exactly where they were in Orthodoxan territory. Surely if the outpost was far enough behind the front lines, they wouldn’t staff it with too many men. Sadly, that didn’t match what little she knew of the Orthodoxans. The outpost where she’d met Major Yonkman, though far from the front, had been heavily manned.

  “Tien, are you there?” A little extra intel would come in handy, but all she got in return was silence. It had been too much to hope that she was still within range of her ship, but she had to try. Maybe she would get lucky and the signal would bounce off some low-hanging clouds and she’d be able to get in contact with the AI. Not having information at the ready to answer the smallest inquiry was driving her nuts. Who knew she could have missed a weather report so badly?

  Her perusal of the area on the near side of the river complete, she turned her attention to the other side of the bridge. There wasn’t anything that she could make out there, and her scope wasn’t powerful enough to bring up any meaningful detail. She tried to pick Jak out but couldn’t. That was no real surprise. She was pretty sure he could disappear into a fold in the ground and no one would know he was there unless they stepped on him. Knowing where he was would have made her feel a little better. He’d said he would set up where he could see her, and the thought reassured her somewhat.

  After she checked out the surroundings, she returned her attention to the buildings below her. The man in the tollhouse looked extremely bored. He’d rocked his chair back on two legs and balanced while bouncing up and down. Every now and again he would turn his head back into the tollhouse. Apparently, he had better things to do than pay attention to the road. He was more focused on the inside of the building than the outside. She could have done naked cartwheels at the top of the hill and he wouldn’t have noticed.

  She crawled sideways, trying to get a better view inside the building and noticed another pair of boots. From her angle, they were all she could make out. So there were two of them in there. From the size of the small structure, if there were more men in there, they would have been shoehorned in. Satisfied with her deduction, she checked the angle of the sun. To her disappointment, the sun had barely moved at all. It was going to be a long afternoon.

  As she watched, she went over the events of the past few days in her head. She still wasn’t sure why Jak was dragging her across the back end of beyond. He had no ties to her, no responsibility for her. He hadn’t indicated that his people wanted to trade with her. He seemed hopeful that they might but had warned her that it would be a hard sell. His sensitivity to women was amazing, especially given that his society was little better in their treatment toward her gender than were the Orthodoxans. In her experience, men raised like that saw women as little more than chattel. They might give lip service to the idea that women were intelligent and capable human beings, but they didn’t really believe it. Their feelings of superiority would be severely threatened if they realized that women could be as good as them, if not better, given the opportunity. Jak wasn’t like that, though. She was sure of it. Maybe it stemmed from the fact that he was so slight. He’d probably fought all his life to be taken seriously. She knew what that was like. When someone else decided that you were less than they were, for any reason, you had to work twice as hard to be twice as good just to get on a level playing field.

  He certainly worked hard. His hands were incredibly strong and he was extremely self-assured. The only chinks she saw in his armor related to his brother, and that armor wasn’t nearly as strong as it had been a couple of days ago. It wasn’t that he was softening, exactly, but she wagered that he’d let her see parts of who he was that nobody had seen since his brother died. Maybe even before. She considered the fact of his being out here without a spotter. His was an extremely solitary way of life, and she didn’t know how he stood it. If it turned out that he was out here for a purpose beyond the mission he’d been given, though—that could compensate for a lot of the solitude. She didn’t know how he thought he would recognize the sniper who killed his brother, but he seemed to think he could track him down.

  What are you doing? Once again, she was thinking about Jak. She needed to stop that. She had plenty else to be thinking of. How about the different equipment she could provide for the Devonites to help them defeat the Orthodoxans? Their current situation really drove home how much they needed a secure communicat
ions system.

  She glanced over to where she thought Jak might be, wondering what he was up to. Stop that. You’re prepping for your next big sale, she admonished herself sternly. There were all sorts of weapons that she could supply for them. She would have to keep the size of the shipments down so as not to attract the League’s attention right away. Eventually they would realize that someone had been meddling, but she hoped she would be long gone by then. She had no desire to spend any more time in a League prison even though their prisons were fairly mild compared to the couple of jails she’d ended up in on the Fringes when a customer or two had realized how badly they’d been outbargained. Some of the Fringe worlds were little more than feudal societies, and when the wrong person got pissed off, they had free rein to do what they wanted to.

  A dust cloud came into view over the horizon while she sat there trying not to think of Jak. She trained the scope on the cloud and brought a vehicle into focus. It drove along the road toward the tollbooth. The dust kicked up as it sped along the dirt road made it difficult to see. From what she could make out, though, it didn’t seem to be a military truck. She watched with interest as it pulled up in front of the small structure and the soldiers stepped out to greet it. One of them talked to the truck’s driver and took possession of some papers while the other one walked around to the truck’s exposed bed. Mounds of round vegetables were heaped in the bed of the truck. They had the blue Haefonian tinge that she’d become familiar with, but they looked like Earth cabbages, a staple vegetable on the Fringes as it grew well almost anywhere.

  The soldier poked the muzzle of his rifle between some of the cabbages. Satisfied with his inspection, he helped himself to an armful of the leafy, round vegetables. He called something out to his partner, then took his prize back to the tollhouse. His partner waved the vehicle through.

  That wasn’t good news. If the Orthodoxans were checking papers and searching vehicles, then she and Jak wouldn’t be able to commandeer a car to make it through the checkpoint. She hoped Jak would have a better idea of how to proceed. The river looked much too wide to cross without a boat, and besides that she had no desire to get back in the water so soon after her last swim.