by H. E. Trent
Jasper looked once more at the board, and his gaze tracked immediately toward carmine skin, violet-colored eyes, and hair the color of his abuela’s Black Velvet variety of roses. Red with some smoke in it.
The Merridon sisters held a certain appeal to a sex-starved savage like him, but they were notoriously closed off. After what they’d gone through, they had the right to be.
Still…
Putting a face to the scheme made the betting so much more personal. Made him want to invest more so he could he could take a woman home and love on her the way she needed. He’d show her that there were men capable of worshiping her the way she deserved, and that they weren’t all the same.
He’d never make her regret giving him the chance.
Any of the three would have been the right age, and their brother had a Terran woman as one of his partners. They wouldn’t be completely hostile toward Jasper simply for him being from Earth, though they certainly had the right to be disgusted by him for a host of other reasons.
Valen. Ara. Sera.
He would have been thrilled for a chance with any of them. If one didn’t like him, maybe she’d warm up her sister for him instead.
The way he was thinking—like some kind of perverse opportunist—was unrecognizable to him, but he stepped up to the swiper. He had no way of knowing how much the other men had bet, only what the minimum was. He bet twice that to get two shots at a single draw, and hoped that investment would be enough to at least be able to pull a slip. He would likely be digging into his old MRE stash to feed himself by the end of the week unless his supervisor decided that Jasper deserved a spontaneous bonus.
Forty-six hundred fucking credits.
“All right!” Kent tapped the lid onto the bucket, picked up the container, and gave it an energetic shake. He set the bucket down, pulled the lid up, and pushed a lamp closer to the bucket. “Let’s get this party started. Lala?” he called over to his wife.
The Jekhan woman behind the makeshift bar crooked up one of her reddish eyebrows.
“You want to update the board for me? Please and thank you and I love you?”
Lala sighed, corked the bottle of Gitanan ale she’d been pouring, and then cut one of the drinkers a side-eye. “Don’t touch that when I walk away.”
“Scout’s honor,” he said.
“I don’t know what that means, but I don’t think you have an honorable bone in your body.”
“Aw, why you gotta be like that?”
She gave the man a sardonic bow, and Jasper snorted.
“Welcome to Jekh,” she said. “How long have you been here?”
“Ten years,” the guy muttered.
“Then you should know how we are.” She moved to the board and picked up a piece of red chalk. Jekhans were fond of red, being fairly red themselves. The Tyneali had been dickering with the gene pool for a thousand years or more. The hybrids were, for the most part, human-appearing, but their coloring was redder than humans’. The Tyneali were red from their hair down to their toenails, not that he’d ever seen their toenails, but he could guess.
“All right.” Kent turned on the randomizer on his tablet and, with a flourish, tapped the screen. Every bet was connected to that application.
Jasper’s heart stuttered.
Please, not Black Velvet.
“You’re up, Vin.”
“Fuck yeah!” Vin sauntered up to the bucket, shoved his hand in, and rooted out a slip.
“Well, who did you get?” Lala called out.
“Gerti.” Vin nodded and pursed his lips. “Okay. Cool.”
“You keeping her?”
Vin shrugged. “May as well. Can’t afford to bet again.” He carried his slip to Lala and then moved toward the bar. He couldn’t get a drink, but there were pastries set out for anyone to take.
Jasper leaned against his support column once more with his arms crossed and watched two more men pull names. One was Brenna.
He grunted again. Even Tevo scoffed, likely thinking the same thing as Jasper. Brenna wasn’t gonna give that guy the time of day. She was such a nerd. There was no way in hell she’d even be able to carry on a conversation with a guy who, by his own admission, hadn’t seen the point of reading a book in the last six years.
“All right…” Kent tapped the screen again. “Jasper! You’re up.”
For real?
He stood dumb, staring. He’d been hoping, of course. After all, he’d transferred a shitload of credits into Kent’s bank account, but part of him hadn’t believed he’d get a draw, much less such an early one.
“Come on, man,” Ken said. “Let’s go.”
Jasper dragged his tongue across his lips and pushed away from the column he was holding up. He’d gotten a pull. He actually got to pull a name.
He approached the bucket and, closing his eyes, dropped his hand into the bucket and let his fingers walk a bit. He felt far more of the bucket’s plastic than he did paper. There were only ten names left. He said a prayer to whichever god would hear him that he hadn’t wasted his money, and then asked for forgiveness for praying for such petty shit in the first place.
Jasper hoped that whomever he pulled would be receptive. He didn’t want to make a second pull, and if he were impulsive again and decided he had to, he’d be broke until his next paycheck. He’d thought he’d left that “living poor” shit behind when he’d left Earth.
“Well? Who’d you get?” Kent asked.
Jasper unfolded the paper he’d pulled and smoothed it against his knee before reading.
“What’s the name?” Lala called over impatiently.
Jasper furrowed his brow and read the name again. His brain made sense of “Merridon” first, and his heart gave a triumphant gallop.
“Jasper!” Lala nudged.
“Shit. Sorry.” He walked the slip over to her.
“Sera Merridon,” she called out.
Black Velvet.
He peered up at the board to confirm her stats. She was the youngest of the three sisters. Lala took the bio down and filed the poster into the portfolio case before Jasper could get his fill of looking at the woman.
“Good luck,” someone muttered. “I hear she’s been in the pool for nine months. No action.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Kent said. “Just like her sisters. I suspect that her big sisters aren’t gonna settle down until she’s squared away.”
“Why’s that?” Jasper asked.
Kent cringed.
“Nope. Don’t make up pretty words to tell me. Give me the truth. I don’t know anything about those women.”
“Okay, normally we’d tell you to read the deeper dossiers in advance, but I guess you’re new enough that you haven’t seen them all.”
Lala rolled her eyes. “For goodness’ sake, she has a small child and an arm that doesn’t work. She was sold into sex slavery and got brutalized so badly that the nerves in her left arm stopped functioning. Would you like to throw her back and re-pull?”
“I—” Shit.
Jasper pushed a hand through his hair and stared at the bucket.
He’d read a lot of the files in a hurry, and hadn’t known that about her. He knew the Merridons had gone through some shit, but hadn’t known about the injury.
Or the kid.
Granted, all women on Jekh, save for the most isolated, had likely endured at least a little during the long Terran occupation, but he knew that some ladies had to have been in worse straits than others. The last thing some needed was a dead-end courtship with a chick who’d already been tossed back a few times, and good for her for protecting herself.
But…her sisters. Rules or no rules, he could try to soften them up if Miss Sera shut him out. Three chances for the price of one.
Maybe he wouldn’t be lonely by the time all was said and done.
Lala sighed and cocked her hip impatiently. “Well?”
He stared at the bucket again, drummed his fingertips against his biceps, and then shrugged. If push came
to shove, he could say later on that he’d merely taken one for the team.
An expensive one.
“Okay,” he said. “Sera Merridon, it is.”
CHAPTER TWO
“See if you can get underneath and lift it a little,” Marco Cipriani said to his partner-in-crime Owen McGarry.
Not actual crime, but figurative crime. Some people might have said that what the duo charged to repair their farm vehicles and their ancient hover-flyers was criminal, but there actually weren’t any laws on Jekh about service costs. Owen had a unique skill set, so folks coughed up the credits. Marco did all right, but he was no Owen. Technically, he was Owen’s business partner in the mechanic venture, but even having a master’s degree in engineering, he considered himself to be something of an apprentice. Owen was a genius. Marco had a hard time getting jealous. They’d been friends since before Marco could even pronounce the guy’s name.
Owen, crouched at the side of a junked hover-truck in Little Gitano’s salvage yard, grunted and gave the vehicle a hard tug.
Marco did the same.
Jekhan vehicles were far lighter than the road vehicles on Earth, but they had to be. Instead of wheels, they had hovers. Marco, being a man of considerable size, was still in awe that those sleek, lightweight things could get folks his weight more than a foot or two off the ground. He trusted Owen that the physics were sound, though. He had probably taken more of those things apart than anyone on the planet.
“Try now,” Owen said.
“Yep.” Marco struck the heel of his boot against the front right panel. The section dislodged, and fell to the ground with a loud crash. “Fuck yeah.”
They set the flyer down, being careful not to smash their fingers.
Owen grabbed the rag from his belt loop and scrubbed some Jekhan dirk off his hands. “Ought to be able to get inside the mechanical compartment now. This thing is a goddamned mess.”
Marco raised his eyebrows in agreement and took a seat on a nearby boulder. The day was unseasonably hot and he’d been sweating like a hooker at church all morning. Boston had had plenty of stifling hot weather, and he should have been acclimated. Still, even after nearly a year on Jekh, he was still trying to adapt to the climate and Little Gitano’s altitude, in particular. He’d been twelve the last time he’d needed to use his inhaler.
He took a huff of Albuterol, held the vapor in, and then let out the breath. Then he shook the canister. There wasn’t much sloshing around in there. “Shit. Running out again.”
“Dorro couldn’t do anything for you?”
“Nah. He’s a good doc, but he needs some time to look at the issue. Jekhans don’t get asthma. They’re acclimated to the place, for one thing, and for another, I think the Tyneali part of their DNA makes them better suited for hot, thin air. The climate suits them.”
“I know how you are, Marco.” Owen gave up on scrubbing, and draped the rag over his shoulder. “You’re gonna tell him not to worry because it’s not a big deal, but he’s probably the one person who could actually cure you.”
Marco scoffed and flipped open the lid of his lunch pail. One of the ladies at the farm had packed the lunches, probably Brenna or Amy—someone who didn’t have a kid strapped to her. So many babies. His mind boggled at the fact that the McGarry sisters had a bunch between the two of them. He’d never imagined Courtney and Erin in maternal capacities. He was too busy having his chops busted by them. They’d looked out for him, though. Scrawny little things didn’t have much physical presence, but they could scare the hell out of people with their patented McGarry Glower.
“The guy’s got more important shit to do than worry about my lungs,” Marco muttered. “As long as I don’t make any trips through space in the near future, I’ll probably be all right. I think that was what aggravated the asthma. My doc on Earth says he’ll keep sending the prescriptions in for me, but I’m having a hard time getting them in bulk.”
“Why don’t you let Dorro decide what’s important to worry about? He’s scientifically curious. Give him the time to find a solution. Remember, he’s got grandkids who are more human than not. He, of all people, would want to know what sorts of chronic issues the human body is capable of harboring.”
Grunting, Marco unwrapped his sandwich. “I’ll think about it. Speaking of travel, when are you, Ais, and Luke heading out to find those Tyneali lab bunkers? Have you decided?”
“Actually, yeah.” Owen swatted a twig out of his curly blond hair and then wiped the flyer grease from his palms onto his work shirt. “We didn’t expect we’d wait this long, but I wasn’t going to go without Ais, and then she ended up on bed rest during her pregnancy, and then Michael was born a little early, and then—”
Marco counted off on his fingers. “Breastfeeding issues, colic, dairy sensitivity, and…” He narrowed his eyes at his exhausted, lifetime friend. “What was the other thing?”
Owen cut him a scathing look as he opened his own lunch pail. “Kid refuses to sleep.”
“Ah. He takes after his namesake, then. Mike never slept. I remember sometimes I’d be online at four or five in the morning, and Mike would also be up.”
“He certainly has his uncle’s flair for the dramatic, too.” The words were cross, but Owen smiled, anyway. Everyone had loved Mike. He’d died a few years back, and there was a hole in the McGarry family tree where he’d been that they all felt keenly. Not liking him was impossible. Funny that his identical twin, Owen, was basically the opposite in temperament.
“He’s sleeping more now, though, now that Ais has stopped consuming dairy,” Owen said. “She’s sad about the dietary change. She was having a sordid love affair with soft cheese, but she’s only going to be nursing for so long. She can pick up where she left off next year.”
“You gonna take Mike with you on the trip?”
“Didn’t want to, but at this point, we may as well take him along and prepared for a longer trip. You should come, too. It’ll be like old times. You, me, and your brother.”
“Sounds like a fun adventure, but I think three…” Marco cringed. “Eh. Three-point-five people is enough.”
“You just don’t want to go anywhere else with Luke.”
“Can you blame me?” Marco loved his big brother. Really, he did, but Luke was a schemer, and Marco always seemed to get tangled up in his schemes, and that shit wasn’t healthy for his self-esteem.
Luke, Owen, and Owen’s wife, Ais, were supposed to be going out to investigate a location where Ais’s mother—and possibly other missing Jekhan women—were being confined by some of the Tyneali’s rogue scientists.
Jekh was supposed to have been an experiment for the Tyneali. In fact, all of the hybrid races they’d seeded throughout the galaxy were. Usually, though, they planted their little pets, studied them for a while, and then left them alone. The Jekhans, however, hadn’t thrived the way the Tyneali had expected. The men had hormonal defects and too few women were born. The population simply wasn’t balanced.
For centuries, the Tyneali quietly returned to Earth to abduct more breeding stock, but their efforts didn’t make a difference. Jekhans probably wouldn’t thrive on their own until they’d bred out most of the Tyneali defects. Although the Tyneali had, in general, decided to leave the hybrids alone and move on, there were a few who were apparently trying to profit politically off the mess they’d left. Ais had been one of their newest crop of lab-bred hybrids. At three-quarters human, she still wasn’t human enough to pass. Her red eyes gave her away.
Also, even if she hadn’t gotten away from the space station where she’d been imprisoned, she would never have been able to do their dirty work for them. She’d never be able to blend in amongst humans on Earth and sow discord. The best the brain trust on the Beshni farm had been able to work out, that was exactly what the Tyneali outliers had wanted. They’d wanted to send their new hybrids to Earth to sow ill will about the Jekhans, who were trying to establish contact with the planet in the hopes of bolstering their gene
pool. Those Tyneali assholes didn’t want them to connect because they weren’t done playing with the Jekhans.
“I’ll be all right here.” Marco took a big bite of his fried chicken sandwich and then another before speaking again. Courtney was a damned good cook to be such an evil little thing. “I heard a rumor that a new junk load was being hauled in from some city or other, and I want to be here to get first pickings. Make a list of what you think we’ll need before you go, and I’ll throw my elbows around and try to get at it.”
“Will do. We’re so close to having that flyer running. All we need is a few more parts and we can get that thing offloaded and get back to design work.”
Marco nodded his agreement and shifted his gaze toward the newcomers walking into the yard. He and Owen were rarely the only ones there. The Little Gitano locals were proficient salvagers and upcyclers. They didn’t like throwing things away, but sometimes they used things in different ways than Marco might have, and in ways that didn’t tap into the actual values of the items. He and Owen tried to get at the best stuff first.
“Damn,” the Terran peacekeeper Jasper Escobar said on approach. Marco knew him a little because he knew Lil, and Lil was great at keeping her favorite people networked.
Jasper shoved his hands into the pockets of his black cargo pants and cocked a brow.
Owen rolled his eyes at him. “What are you putting together now? More bombs?”
Jasper wagged a finger at him. “Now, now, young buck. Don’t go getting chompy. Respect your elders and shit.”
“Aw, Fuck off, Escobar.”
Escobar threw his head back and laughed, long and loud. When he’d calmed down a bit, he crouched beside Owen and looked at the various chips, coils, and sensors Owen had piled onto a blanket beside the junked flyer. “Nah. I’m out of the bomb-making business. Mostly I look for odds and ends to take apart and see what’s inside. Engineering curiosity, is all. I’m not as good as you. I just did what the Air Force told me to do, and did all right at that.”