by H. E. Trent
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
If Luke had anything to say at all about the Tyneali, it was that the beasts were good at hiding their shit. He and Owen had erroneously assumed that getting into the bunker was a simple matter of climbing down the ladders from the landing perches and taking a few paces into the jungle.
No.
They’d needed four hours to figure out that the data in Owen’s data pod wasn’t entirely literal. Their Tyneali “allies” had shown them where to land, but the bunker wasn’t actually where specified. They’d ended up having to make camp in the jungle to spare themselves the walk back to the perches.
“For all I know, you’re leading me on a wild goose chase,” Hauge said with a growl and tossed the crust of his sandwich into the dense foliage.
Luke rolled his eyes and pushed himself to standing. The seat of his pants was soaked through from the ground, and he didn’t want to sit in that damp spot so long that his ass got numb. He couldn’t think when his ass tingled. He preferred to be the pain in the ass, not to feel one.
Owen pulled the hood of Ais’s rain slicker further down her brow and closed the front of the jacket around Michael, who was strapped to her chest. “To what end?” he asked Hauge. “None of us are having a great time right now. If we were going to waste your time, I would have suggested Ais and Michael stay at home.”
Ais sighed.
“Let me hold him,” Hauge said. “He must be very heavy by now, and you look tired.”
“He’s nursing,” Ais said.
“Again?”
“That’s the only way he’ll fall asleep.”
“You spoil him.”
“I can’t tell if you’re judging me or approving.”
Hauge furrowed his brow. “Probably more of the second. Hauges are spoiled by default.”
“He’s not a Hauge. He’s a McGarry,” Owen said.
“He’s part Hauge. A quarter, at least. As much Hauge as he is McGarry.”
Owen pinched the bridge of his nose, and said nothing. He wasn’t the kind of guy who courted arguments or stayed in them once he’d been dragged in. Normally, he’d just walk away. There wasn’t very far he could go, though. Until the torrential rain passed, their best bet was to stay beneath the spot of jungle canopy they’d found that wasn’t too leaky. The best they could tell, they were as close to the bunker as they were to the ships, so turning back was pointless.
“In response to your question,” Hauge said, “I don’t believe you want me to know where the bunker is. You believe I’ll pass the information to my father and that I have some nefarious scheme in mind.”
“You probably do. I’m sure your mother isn’t so geeked to know that Ais’s mother exists,” Luke said. “I mean, shit, your daddy has this beautiful daughter your mother had nothing to do with making, and she’s a little jealous. Of course she’s going to have some malice toward Ona.”
Hauge narrowed his eyes and wiped his fingertips daintily on a napkin. “My father has never even met Ona. You behave as though my mother believes he’d abandon her for a stranger.”
“I have no idea what your mother believes, but from what I know about her, she’s not the most rational creature in the castle, hmm?”
“Watch your tongue.”
“Yeah, fuck you very much.”
Ais sighed again. “Behave.”
“Sorry, sweetheart. I love you, but your brother is a dick.” Eying Owen, Luke unscrewed the cap of his thermos and took a long slug of coffee. “Are you reading any sort of electronics activity now that the rain is letting up?”
Owen grunted and wrested his tablet out of his knapsack. “Yeah, the damned thing’s been chirping for the past five minutes, but this is Terran technology trying to make sense of Tyneali signals. Salehi helped me fine-tune the programming before we left, but we’re going to need to wait a few more minutes for the reconfiguration. Theoretically, it should be able to communicate with the bunker’s technology now that we’re in close range. Hopefully, by the time those clouds dry out, we’ll know which way to go.”
“Hmm.” Hauge scooted down farther against his chosen tree trunk and unrolled his sleeves over his forearms. “I hope the girls are entertaining themselves well and haven’t gone off exploring.”
“They’re grown women,” Luke muttered, knocking some kind of Jekhan moss off his ass. “If they wander off like idiots without maps or tracking gear, they deserve whatever comes to them. I seriously can’t believe you brought a freaking entourage on this errand.”
“Two women is hardly an entourage,” Hauge groused. “On Earth, I have staff following me around.”
“Staff?” Ais scrunched her nose.
She was too cute for her own good. That was the only reason Luke hadn’t punched Hauge in the eye. He didn’t want to scandalize the poor dear any more than she needed to be, even if her brother deserved what he got.
Hauge grunted and zipped up his jacket. “Aides and such.”
“None wanted to follow you to Jekh, huh?” Owen asked.
“Oh, some did want to. I believe that some would be prepared to relocate should I have to. My man Oreva for certain. We go way back to my days at Oxford.”
“What’s an Oxford-educated man doing in your staff?” Luke asked with a scoff.
Hauge studied his nails. “Oreva isn’t staff. He’s a business partner. We co-own a couple of luxury hotels in Lagos and have various residential holdings. He simply spends his time in the northern climes because he’s accustomed to doing so at this point. Naturally, I also have a manservant who could have come along.”
“A manservant,” Luke said drolly.
Hauge flitted his blue-green gaze over to him. “Naturally.”
“Poor you, tromping all over backwater Jekh without your keepers.”
“I cope fine, but thank you for your concern.”
“Are you coping, though? Seems to me that you’re looking for trouble.”
“I’m sure I have no clue what you mean.”
“Right. Sure you don’t.” Luke headed into the jungle. “I’ll be back. Coffee goes in, and the coffee needs to go back out.”
Luke was out of earshot of the temporary encampment and also out of visual range. He unfastened his button and lowered his fly, closing his eyes as he took his junk in hand and pointed his stream in the general direction of a particularly bumpy patch of fungus. At least, he thought it was fungus. The things that grew on Jekh didn’t necessarily have close equivalents to the things that grew on Earth. The native things called trees were really only oversized vines that didn’t have leaves, but instead sprouted some sort of energy collection pods or something. Mature vines were used for wood, but the logs were too soft to build habitable structures with.
Fortunately, the Tyneali had used some foresight and seeded much of Jekh with trees from Earth that had adapted to the environment over time. It was up to the Jekhans to actually harvest and farm the trees, assuming they could find them. That was another thing the Tyneali were good at—not telling the Jekhans shit about what was around them. They were, after all, an experiment. Lab rats on a big-assed planet.
“Ugh,” he groaned at the sound of leaves being crushed behind him, and footsteps landing wetly on the jungle floor. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, don’t even tell me. Spare me the lecture, Owen.” Luke shook his cock dry and tucked it into his boxer shorts. “Be nicer to Ais’s brother. I don’t think you care, though, do you?”
“I care very much,” came Hauge’s deep voice.
Luke’s hand stilled over his fly and anger flared. “What the hell do you want?”
“Same as you. To relieve myself of coffee.”
Luke heard the whoosh of the zipper pull being ripped downward and then the rustle of fabric. He took a deep breath. “You could have gone any other way.”
“Yes, well, we’d already cleared the path this way. No need to hack through vines elsewhere simply to take a piss.”
“Enjoy your leak.” Luke started heading back to the
encampment.
“What’s your rush?”
Luke stopped with his back to Hauge and his gaze fixed on a broad, heart-shaped leaf. He chose his words carefully, not that he thought doing so would make a difference. He’d spoken his piece back in Hauge’s ship, and he hadn’t changed his mind. “I think I was pretty clear when I suggested that I’d fuck you up if you came near me.”
“I don’t believe you would.”
“Obviously, you don’t know me very well.”
Hauge zipped up and Luke glanced over his shoulder at him.
The royal pretty boy was wearing a smirk. Again, Luke wasn’t sure if he wanted to smack it or kiss it off his face. Maybe a little of both, one after the other. He shouldn’t have liked the idea of that as much as he did. The fact he did simply meant he was a predictable sort of sadist.
“Do me a favor and stay away from me,” Luke said.
“Or else what?”
“Or else you’re going to get yourself in trouble.”
“I’m not afraid of trouble.”
“Oh, but you are.” Luke backtracked to where Hauge was and folded his arms over his chest. “You said it yourself. You said not to tell anyone.”
“And? I don’t see where one thing has to do with the other.”
“And I don’t like that. Maybe you’re used to having things a certain way back at home, but you’re not gonna get eager compliance from me. I have standards—rules, okay? Like hell I’m going to set them aside for a bit of ducal ass.”
“I’m not a duke. I’m the son of a prince and grandson of the king. We don’t have dukes in our royal structure.”
Luke shrugged. “Not having a name doesn’t mean the job’s not the same shit.”
“If you say so. Further, why you should be so certain I’d allow you anywhere near my ass?”
Hauge would, and he’d like it. Luke knew his type.
Luke snorted and continued on his way back to the camp. “Okay, then. That’s cute that you have opinions.”
“But, I don’t—”
Hauge didn’t finish whatever he’d had in mind to say. Luke was already too close to the camp, and Hauge certainly wouldn’t have shouted out his objection. He wouldn’t have wanted Ais and Owen to know about his earlier adventures in erotic humiliation.
Luke plucked a disposable sanitizing wipe out of the container and scrubbed his hands.
“Did you see Alex?” Ais asked wearily. “He went that way.”
“Yeah, I saw him. He should be heading back now.”
And he was.
Alex shouldered his way through a couple of tight branches and cut Luke an incendiary glare that made Luke roll his eyes.
Hauge might have been used to being in charge of things, but Luke wasn’t about to be one of those things. The sooner he learned that, the better.
“Here,” Luke said, tossing him the wipe container. “Sanitize, like a good little duke.”
Hauge snatched the canister handily out of the air and muttered, “Bastard.”
“Planned and much-loved like all the Ciprianis, actually.” Luke blew him a kiss, in case Hauge had forgotten just that quickly how much he loved Luke’s mouth.
Owen raised one of his dark blond brows. “Okay. The tracker is starting to feed us some data,” he said. “The incoming information is still patchy, but we do know the end point of this trek, if not the entire path between here and there. Birds-eye, we’re about three kilometers from the bunker.”
“We don’t know if we’re going to have to scale crevasses or swim across white water rapids to get there, huh?” Luke asked.
Owen’s expression was grim. “Exactly. We didn’t see any of that stuff from the air, though. Chances are pretty good that the trek is going to be more of the same that we’ve already encountered.”
“More hacking vines and tripping over roots, then.”
“Precisely.”
“Well, let’s get moving.” Luke grabbed his pack off the ground and slung it onto his back before snatching up his machete. “I bet that bunker is nice and dry inside.”
“Mmm. That motivates me to move, that’s for sure.” Owen handed his tablet to Luke and retreated to help Ais to her feet with Michael. “Here. More data’s coming up.”
Luke peered down at the 3D map unscrambling on the screen. No crevasses. No rivers. Plenty of jungle ahead, but there was also a large clearing for them to pass through in the last kilometer. The bunker appeared to be just on the other side, footsteps beyond the start of a new section of jungle. “The vines look a little less dense ahead. That’s good.”
“Yes,” Hauge said. “Splendid. My palms are bloody already.”
“You poor delicate baby. Want me to kiss them and make the boo-boos go bye-bye?” Luke moved on ahead and started hacking the more stubborn of the vines. Mostly, they could squeeze through without chopping, but Ais would have had to risk pinching Michael, and they didn’t want that. “Never had a callus before?”
Hauge followed close behind him, chopping the vines on the left as Luke focused his attention on the ones on the right. “I keep a callus or two. You can’t possibly be productive unless you get one on occasion.”
“I’m surprised you don’t have some sweet little thing on your staff whose sole purpose is to keep your hands pink and soft.”
“Soft hands are overrated. There’s something to be said for texture. I’ll pass on the kisses, but thank you.”
“Overrated, you say? Oh, is that right?” Luke paused to pluck an interesting-looking pink flower from a thorny bush. The bud was showy and bright, and he thought it would look pretty tucked behind Ais’s ear and against her dark hair.
“Mmm. Sometimes, smooth doesn’t do anything for me.”
“Says the man who shaves his beard off down to the cellular level.”
“I don’t like the way I look with facial hair.”
“Who cares how you look? You’re on Jekh.”
Hauge lunged forward enough to say, “I believe you do,” without Owen and Ais, behind him, overhearing.
Saying nothing, Luke kept moving.
Whether Luke liked the looks of Hauge or not made no difference. The man was a complete shitheel. Handsomeness didn’t make up for a subpar personality, and like he’d said.
Luke had standards.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Jasper hurled himself out of the open door of the hover-flyer and landed heavily on the fleeing absconder—a Terran anarchist the Jekhan Alliance had flagged as a Priority One capture.
Charles Fleming had been planting explosives everywhere chaos was possible, including one refugee re-acclimatization center in Buinet, a fledging medical lab critical in manufacturing the hormone regulation drug Marscadrel, and also a travel hub frequented mostly by women and children seeking transfer to other parts of the planet. One death and seventeen critical injuries could be directly attributed to him, and the Jekhans were getting antsy about his movements. They wanted to be able to trust the Terrans remaining on the planet, but people like him made peace difficult.
He’d been at the top of Jasper’s agenda for months, and on a whim, Jasper had done a patrol toward the canyon. Fleming had gotten sloppy. He’d left his signal booster out in plain sight, and Jasper didn’t wait for backup. He gave chase, slapping his COM as he spied Fleming fleeing toward his stolen flyer.
“I’m in the north mouth of the canyon. Got eyes on Fleming,” he told his patrol double, and leaped over a ditch, drawing his weapon as the bastard fired a nine-millimeter round at him.
Jasper dodged the poorly-aimed projectile, but also misjudged the pitch of the fucking hill. No matter how hard he dug his elbows into the earth and tried to stop him—and his quarry—from rolling downward, he kept toppling downward, and faster as the weeds gave way to smooth rock.
He let go of the anarchist’s arms hoping to get better bracing. Gravity was going to be a bitch at the bottom of that canyon, and he needed to slow his descent or the best possible scenario would be
that he would be home in traction for a week or two.
His fingertips slipped from a rocky shelf he’d grabbed onto and he cringed at the sound of a heavy thump.
Fleming.
“Shit!” Jasper managed to get out as his chin scraped against the wall. The ground loomed and he gave his body a hard shove away from the wall to clear the patch of brambles at the bottom and also Fleming’s crumbled form.
That was the best he could do.
He hit the ground, hip-first, right beside his unconscious suspect before it was lights out.
___
When Jasper opened his eyes again, he reflexively and immediately closed them. He felt like he’d played Truth or Dare with a bottle of tequila, and the worm had won. His head was both pounding and spinning, and he couldn’t move his body at all as if his spine had been severed at the exact right place to disable his brain’s communication with his extremities.
“What…the hell?” His voice was barely a whisper. He could hardly push air through his throat, and his heart pounded, his pulse loud as a marching band drum line in his ear. He directed his arms to slap down onto whatever he was laying on and to get him upright, but he could hardly even draw a deep breath. There was a heavy, but invisible, weight on his chest that kept him from fully expanding his lungs.
“What’s…what’s happening?” his voice came out in a pitiful-sounding rasp, and he dragged his dry tongue across even dryer lips.
Alien abduction horror flicks started that way. They kept their pets immobile and ignorant, and feasted on their fear.
Is that what’s happening?
Weirder shit had happened. Anything was possible.
“Tyneali?” He somehow figured out how to instruct his brain to make his eyelid move. He raised it to find bleary brightness that made him blink repeatedly. “Fuckin’ Tyneali got me?”
“No, no, no. No one so curious as the Tyneali, I assure you,” came a chuckling voice from across the room.
“Who’s there?” Jasper asked. He couldn’t move his head more than a couple of inches and his periphery was giving up no clues.
“Just Dorro,” the doctor said in the same calm, neutral manner as always.