Trustworthy

by Astrid Amara

“Hey,” he said again.

  I grunted in response, hoping to get out of a conversation.

  I’d finally shed those awful clothes and sprawled across the bed, naked, with Mack between my thighs. All was right with the world. I enjoyed what Mack did with his fingers and mouth and didn’t feel particularly chatty.

  But apparently he did. “You remember it’s Henry’s birthday next week, right? You feel like punking him at the Solace bar when we’re off-duty?” When I didn’t respond, Mack continued, “I’m thinking we go in disguise. You wear those shades and the crazy-ass outfit Derek bought last month and try and pick him up. And when he freaks—”

  “I’m no actor,” I told Mack.

  “You always say that, but you are. You pretend to be a decent human being every day.”

  “Mack?”

  “Yeah?” He glanced up at me from between my legs.

  “Shut your trap.”

  “So you’re saying you want me to stop doing this?” Mack pulled my length down his throat as he pressed his fingers inside me.

  I shivered. “You can keep doing that but stop talking while you’re doing it.”

  He hummed around my length, and I closed my eyes again. I threaded my fingers through his thick black hair, giving it a gentle yank to encourage him.

  Mack continued to hum around my cock, and I knew he was actually still talking. His brain went a million miles a minute, like the rest of him.

  I settled back and let myself focus on him. The feel of his fingers inside me, the knowledgeable press of them, effortlessly finding the space inside that ricocheted pleasure.

  The funny thing was, this never got boring. I would have thought years of the same sex with the same partner would grow stale. But when it was this mind-blowingly good, when every action brought to mind all the other erotic scenes of our past, when each touch reminded me of every other touch, every gasp, every time I came on him, in him, beside him, it couldn’t do anything but magnify the intensity of the experience.

  I was close to climax when both our osys bands squawked from the bedside table.

  “C Squad!” The tinny voice of Christopher Cole, our commanding officer, ordered us to attention.

  “C Squad report!” he shouted.

  “Motherfucker,” Mack cursed. He sat up and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and his fingers on the sheet. He reached for my osys since it was closer. “Mackenzie here, with Toreli,” he said.

  “We’ve got revolutionaries on the Beltway. Where are you?”

  Mack and I stared at each other. We just ate on the Beltway. We were far from the revolutionary outposts in the agri-domes.

  “On the Beltway?” Mack repeated.

  “Yes, goddamnit!” Cole shouted.

  “We’re on the Beltway,” Mack replied. “South end. Tourist Biodome, on shore leave—”

  “Shore leave is cancelled, effective immediately. All C Squad units to report to security outpost alpha by nineteen-hundred hours. We’ve got these assholes shooting senators now.”

  “Our gear is in the launcher,” I said and repeated myself to make sure Cole heard me.

  “Command will head there with the launcher now. Hold tight at the security gate. We’ll get you outfitted. Call out.”

  Mack stared at the osys band in his hand, as if it had been the device guilty of shooting innocent people in the tourist biodome.

  “Fuck,” I said, rubbing a hand over my face.

  Mack looked stunned. “I didn’t know this would happen.”

  “Who would know?” I replied. “I guess we’ll have to try out the strawberry-flavored lube I bought as a surprise later.” I tried for levity, but I could tell by Mack’s expression that he wasn’t having any of it. Whenever Calypso’s revolutionary war branched beyond the battlefield and terrorized innocent civilians, Mack took it personally. Probably something to do with the fact that his mother had been a Calypso revolutionary and shot by Calypso government forces like us.

  When it was soldier on soldier, he didn’t have to think about allegiances.

  He stared at me, looking crestfallen. “Sorry, cowboy.”

  I sat up and hugged him. The two of us held each other for a long moment. I sniffed at his bare shoulder, taking in the sweaty, musky scent that was Robert Mackenzie and wishing I could bottle it.

  I could feel the tension in Mack’s body. “You okay?” I asked, stupidly, because I knew he wasn’t.

  “I don’t know why they did this. I don’t know.” He looked personally affronted.

  I had it easier than him. I didn’t know what happened to my folks. Whatever had occurred early enough in my childhood to land me in an orphanage left me with no distinct memories of family. My earliest recollections were hazy and not very good. At all.

  Arriving at the center had been another bad piece of luck to follow the others. But Mack had known his parents, had been loved as a child. He remembered the way his mom had held his hand, and he remembered her scream when she’d been shot down.

  I’d once asked him how it felt to be in the same army that had made him an orphan.

  “Why’d you join?” he’d asked me, deflecting the question.

  I had shrugged. “Because you did.”

  He’d seemed saddened by my comment, but we didn’t really talk about it much more after that. I always had assumed Mack had joined because our choices were so slim—enlisting was the only way two nothings on Calypso would have steady paychecks.

  Now I pressed my lips to the soft, warm space beneath his ear. “We could run.”

  I felt him tense and squeeze me tighter. “No.” He pulled back and stared into my eyes. “Too risky. Let’s finish our tour. Then we can bail. Then we’ll be free.”

  I held back my derisive snort. Most of the ex-Calypso soldiers went on to be private security for Calypso businesses. Or investigators for one of the big firms like Katteri Enterprises or Trust Insurance. And if they got off-world, they ended up for hire in some other army on some other satellite or colony. Free wasn’t really the right word for it.

  Doomed sounded more accurate.

  Still, when Mack worried, I didn’t provoke him. “We’ll do what we have to do, and maybe we can get shore leave reinstated after this is quelled.” I punched the bedspread. “What the hell are those assholes doing on the Beltway? Why are they targeting the population center?”

  Mack sighed and rubbed his large hand over his face “Honestly, I’m surprised it’s taken this long. Clearly, burning crops isn’t getting their message across.”

  I leaned forward and kissed him. I’d meant it to be a soft kiss, a comfort kiss, but I remained half-hard from his earlier ministrations. Soon he was as well. I laid him back and straddled him, rubbing our cocks together as I plunged my tongue in his mouth.

  “Cole said nineteen-hundred hours,” I whispered, giving Mack a smirk. “Plenty of time to finish what we started, tiger.”

  Mack smiled back. “Okay then. Show me your other skill set.”

  * * * *

  By the time we got our shit packed up, checked out, and made it to the security gate at the south end of the Beltway, it was almost nineteen hundred. We weren’t in uniform, so we had to show our Recon ID to get past the gate. All three domes that made up the Beltway—The Tourist Biodome, the Central Biodome, and the Financial Biodome—were on complete lockdown after the shooting.

  Sergeant Christopher Cole waited for us, alongside five other members of our squad. He was a tall, good-looking man with boyish features and a full head of curly brown hair. I supposed, vaguely, that he was attractive, but my dislike of him made me incapable of finding anything attractive about him.

  “Where’s Chan and Garcia?” Mack asked. He started peeling off layers to put on his polymesh armor. I followed suit.

  “Christ if I know,” Cole yelled. He looked stressed out. “They didn’t answer their osys. Billy’s on his way from his girlfriend’s in Garden 3.”

  The polymesh was thin, breathable, and bulletproof. B
ut it was also hard as hell to get on, and I broke out in a sweat yanking the pants over my legs. Mack laughed at me as I cursed.

  By the time I had the pants, tunic, and compression socks on, my hair was wet with sweat. The fuckers in the Tourist biodome liked it hot, and I broiled, despite the thin mesh. I yanked on my brown cowboy boots and hunted around my supply sack for my weapons belt.

  “They’ve hit the citizen train,” Cole informed us, “specifically targeting a passenger car carrying Senator Jill Wyzac and her family.”

  “Are they dead?” Mack asked, face stony, clenching his jaw.

  “Kids are fine,” Cole told him. “The senator and her husband are both in critical condition. The blast killed fifteen civvies and sent another thirty or so to the clinic. They hit the part of the track where it enters the biodome at an angle, outside of the security cams. They planned this well.”

  “Motherfuckers.” That was Ginger Baker, a stern woman who’d been part of C Squad as long as we had. She clicked her energy blaster onto her belt clip.

  “Here’s your gear,” Cole told her, handing Baker her supply duffel.

  “What were you up to?” I asked Ginger. Of our ten-person squad, Ginger was the closest friend I had besides Mack, mostly because, unlike Mack, she didn’t talk incessantly.

  She reached out and tapped my knuckles with hers in way of greeting. “Getting laid. You?”

  “Me too.”

  “What’s new?” It was a constant annoyance to Ginger that my romantic partner bivouacked with me.

  “Anyone I know?” I asked her.

  Ginger said, “Maybe. You remember that night a few weeks back at the farm center? Tall, dark-haired man working the combine, big brown eyes?”

  “I do,” said Mack, because he remembered everything, all the time. It was one of his more annoying features.

  “His name’s Leo,” Ginger said dreamily.

  I groaned. “Oh God. Not again.”

  “Fuck you, man. He likes me.”

  “You tell him about the three kids?” I asked. Mack punched me in the arm to shut me up. It hurt, but I pretended it didn’t.

  “Will you assholes stop gossiping like a bunch of fucking teenagers and get geared up?” Cole snapped.

  I waved at myself. “Already done, sir.”

  “Helmet,” he demanded.

  I rolled my eyes but tapped the release switch above my collar that triggered the helmet. It rolled over my head, and I blinked as the osys around my wrist synched with the info screen.

  At once the image views from the osys covered the top left of my visor, and to the right popped up the heart rate monitors of all the rest of the C Squad. It always comforted me to watch that even, calming rhythmic line pulsing under “R Mackenzie”.

  Cloris Chan joined us a few minutes after, and, by the time we were geared up, Franco Garcia and Billy V showed up as well, looking miserable for having their shore leaves abbreviated.

  We all were. It had been a solid year without a break. Three days off wasn’t even enough for the bruises to fade.

  From the exterior security post at the south end of the tourist biodome there was a five-block walk down the primary boulevard to the civilian station. On either side of the station, tall skyscrapers reached to the top of the biodome. It was a congested battlefield, and it made me nervous, trying to find security in such an urban setting.

  The station itself was a long, thin structure that stretched the length of the boulevard to the tracks on the other side.

  “Toreli,” Cole ordered. “I want you on the rooftop of the station. Mackenzie, Chan, Baker, Garcia, take positions on the north end of the platform. B Squad is north of us and going to push them in our direction. Everyone else with me on the south exit in case they get past. Commlink station thirty-three.”

  “Copy,” we all said and then moved out. I hoisted my long-range energy rifle over my shoulder. Mack caught me by the shoulder and bumped his helmet against mine, the closest thing to a kiss we could get in full combat gear.

  I walked into the ornate station and headed up the staircase until I reached the fifth floor. The entire station was empty save for other military personnel, who didn’t give me and my big gun a second glance.

  My osys info screen on my helmet couldn’t download detailed specs of the building, so I had to go down three separate hallways before locating the primary emergency staircase that led to the roof. The door was bolted, but I had a maglock that worked on almost every lock keyed for Calypso security forces. The door opened with a groan.

  On the flat roof, I was only about twenty feet beneath the top of the biodome. The air was hot up here and humid from the water control systems. The biodome rains started at eighteen hundred every evening and turned on and off every hour. In another twenty minutes, I was going to get soaked.

  Sol 10 had started to set in the east behind me, and it lit the foggy glow of the urban metropolis with a fading golden light. It shimmered over the bright yellow sands of the planet, glinting with fragments of naturally formed glass. Seventy meters below was the covered awning of the train platform, and beneath that, the silvery streaks of the train tracks. They stretched to the north, then turned where they pierced the biodome lock. Metallic debris glinted near the entrance, and the exploded remains of the train lay scattered over the track, looking like a child’s toy set from this distance.

  I could smell the burned-out hull of the exploded train car, even through my helmet filter. It smelled different here, like oil and hair. I was used to the smell of scorched soybeans and wheat.

  The roof had a low solid wall about one and a half meters in height, and a slight lip over the top, under which I could crouch if need be. I leaned over the edge and set up my long-range rifle so I could see Mack and the others in my sights. It used to bother me, not being down on the ground with Mack. But when it became clear I was much better at distance accuracy than anyone else in the Land Force, I resigned myself to the fact that I would perpetually work alone, isolated on a high point, killing men and women before they got within sight of my lover.

  Cole got on the commsystem and reminded us that our goal wasn’t to shoot on sight. There were an estimated four revolutionaries in the area, and they wanted at least one or two alive for questioning. It was unusual but not unheard of. Powerful Calypso corporations funded us and wanted details on who was sabotaging their businesses. But it complicated things.

  I watched Mack and the others through my enhanced scope and listened to the chatter over the commline.

  “East alley view— clear.”

  “Second platform—clear.”

  “Moving toward wreckage.” That was Mack. I saw his body swivel, saw him swing back to look at the station. I couldn’t see his face through the helmet at this distance, but I know he looked for me. I smiled.

  “No movement spotted from up here,” I stated.

  We didn’t have the B squad coms patched through, but Cole did, and he gave us reports of their sweep on the other side of the blown biodome entrance.

  I saw the glint of something near the wreckage at the biodome lock.

  “Movement at lock,” I said, quickly re-aiming.

  There was a deep thud and a burst of light. I squinted but didn’t move my rifle. It was an electrical grenade, short range. At once Mack and his team crouched, then moved into formation.

  I saw one of the revolutionaries in a bio-suit skitter around some of the wreckage. For a moment I hesitated. We only had four, and the bosses wanted two alive. But I also had a shot.

  While I debated, the rev stepped out of cover, raising another energy grenade toward Mack’s team. Like my armor, the revs’ suits had helmets that would retract with the flip of a switch—or a correctly aimed shot. It was something I was renowned for in Calypso Recon. I breathed out and shot three quick shots into his or her helmet.

  The third shot triggered the helmet release. And while he was distracted by this, Mack shot the rev in the arm that held the grenade. The t
eam swarmed forward.

  “Rev down,” Chan cried. She slammed her hand against the outside of her helmet. “Shit. Can you guys hear me?”

  “Yes,” I said. I noticed Mack fiddling with his helmet too. Chan’s and Mack’s heart rates shot up in my visor.

  I heard the muffled whoosh whoosh of a gyropod before I spotted it—appearing as if from thin air from around the southern side of the station. It rose above me so fast I didn’t have a chance to aim at the pilot, and my weapon couldn’t damage a transport pod with a class C engine.

  Besides, I had to stay focused on Mack on the ground. If there was one rev on the ground near them and armed, there would be more. Mack kept hitting the side of his shell helmet, as if he had an earache.

  Bullets hit the rooftop from above, and I flinched and curled tighter, ducking under the lip of the roof.

  “Baker, wanna do me a favor?” I called out on my osys.

  Ginger had the grenade launcher, and yanked this from her duffel. But nothing happened when she fired. “Shit! Fucking thing is empty! Sorry, Toreli.”

  More shots fired from the gyropod and I shot back, although with that armor it was pointless. At least they weren’t using shrapnel.

  I quickly sat up to glance over the edge to see Mack fussing with his helmet. “What’s wrong with Mack?” I demanded.

  “His helmet’s down,” Garcia told me, sounding winded. “Our tech’s been shorted by the electrical blast.”

  I glanced down at them again. No one was left to approach them from the sides, and they moved toward the rest of the squad. Both Mack and Chan had their helmets retracted. Through the scope I could make out his expression of serious concentration.

  “Gyropod behind us,” Mack said, his voice less echoey now that his earphone was out of the helmet. “Two revs ahead spotted in wreckage. Moving forward.”

  I took another pot shot at the gyropod, hoping to get lucky, but it moved behind me.

  I got hit in the back by a spray of bullets and slammed forward into the roof tiles. The polymesh absorbed most of the blow, but it still knocked the shit out of me. I struggled to catch my breath. I turned over and got shot again in the shoulder. As I scooted on my back to crouch under the lip of the wall, a series of bullets slammed into me from the gyropod and I lay stunned, body beaten by each blow. The polymesh heated as it absorbed the energy and I began to burn. I tried to scramble farther under the lip.