by H. E. Trent
“My father won’t stop trying to get her home.”
“And Owen and I won’t stop protecting her from him.”
“She doesn’t need protection from him, Luke.”
At the surface, Luke took Ais’s wrist in his hand and said into the COM, “Maybe not from him personally, but from what he is and how that makes the people around him behave. Understood?”
“Yes.”
“Good. You can learn. I’m glad for you, Duke.”
“Stop calling me that.” Hauge’s voice was weary, but resigned. He had to know Luke wasn’t going to stop that shit. He was having way too much fun.
There came a clank down below, followed by a foreign shout.
“Jekhan,” Ais translated. “They say get back.”
“So they can shoot me?” Hauge asked.
“No,” Ais said. “They don’t want you rushing the door.”
“What do they think I’m possibly going to do? I’m one man.”
“A six-foot-something man who’s never missed a meal,” Luke said.
“Noted.” Hauge put his back to the wall and moved as much around the circle as he dared. He was well within easy shooting range, but he probably wanted to keep at least the dream of being able to protect himself.
A shrill beep echoed through the chamber. Then another, longer and lower. The third was even more protracted and had enough bass to make Luke’s ass cheeks clench from the upsetting frequency.
There came a resonant click from the door, and then a grind as the panel retracted.
Hauge put up his hands preemptively and said, “I won’t move. Tell them, Ais. Speak in whatever language they understand.”
She did.
“What do you see, Duke?” Luke asked. “I can’t see who’s at the door from here.”
“That’s because there’s an anteroom in front of me. They’ve opened the door from within the next room. They’re looking at me from across the room.”
“How many?” Owen asked.
“Two women. Older.”
“Is one my mother?” Ais was trying, but failing, to keep the anticipation out of her voice. She was so excited that her body was practically thrumming.
“No, sweetheart. I don’t believe so. Hair’s not right. Your mother’s hair is red, yes?”
“Could be gray by now,” Owen said.
“Yes, but these women have black hair and brown. Not red.”
The raspy voice was loud through the speakers that must have been mounted inside the anteroom.
“What are they saying, Ais?” Hauge asked.
“They want to know when we will return Ona.”
“Hold up,” Owen said. “Why don’t they come with us? Don’t they want to get out?”
Ais asked them.
The speaker boomed with more rapid-fire responses.
“Ah.” Ais grimaced. “They still do not trust us. They believe they’re safer inside with conditions on the planet being what they are. I don’t think they know that the conflict with the Terrans is over.”
“I’m surprised they even know one started. They’ve been sequestered for more than twenty-five years, haven’t they?”
“I believe so.” Ais relayed some information into her COM.
After a couple of minutes of silence, the bleating noise from earlier started again, but farther inside.
“What’s going on, Duke?” Luke called down.
“I believe the inner door is opening. What did you tell them, Ais?”
“I told them that we will return within a couple of hours, assuming our journey is an easy one.”
“Certainly, they will count every hour and hold us out our word. Here she comes.”
“Who?” Ais asked.
“A woman. You’ll see. They’re coming toward me now. I’ll—”
His words were drowned beneath the din of the door gears and the alarm, and all Luke could see from the surface was a dark hand grabbing him by his sleeve.
A tall, thin figure stepped out slowly and stared toward the bunker wall until the bleating stopped.
The door latch was thrown in place from the inside, and the hooded figure was a statue. Not looking up. Not moving.
Luke took Ais’s wrist. “Duke?”
There was a shout on the other end—or perhaps a scold. Luke couldn’t tell the temperature of the speaker’s emotion, but either way, he didn’t like the tone. He didn’t trust that Hauge would know how to handle people and come out alive.
“Duke, say something, goddammit.”
“I don’t know what they are saying,” Hauge said.
Jesus. Luke dragged his hand down his face.
“I am fine for now. Please hurry. I do not wish to agitate them further.”
“Understood.”
“Mute your mic, yes?”
“Yeah,” Owen said. He made the appropriate adjustments on Ais’s COM.
Luke peered over the edge of the hole.
The person was looking up then—a woman, judging by the delicacy of her bone structure and the fullness of her lips. She held her ratty gray cloak closed at the neck and, with her other hand, shielded her gaze from the sun overhead.
“Ona?” Luke asked her. “Is that you? Are you Ona Estar?”
“She probably doesn’t speak English,” Owen said.
“Ah. That’s right. Ais, you want to…” Eying Ais, Luke let the question trail off.
Apparently, it was Ais’s turn to go still as a statue. She was several feet from the edge and couldn’t see down into the hole from where she stood, but she made no effort to move closer. In fact, she was staring straight ahead as if lost in thought. As if they hadn’t made the journey to find her mother.
“Ais.” Owen gave her back a tender rub and stooped a bit to meet her gaze. “Honey?”
Her mouth opened, and then closed without a word. Taking tentative steps toward the edge, she wrapped her arms tight around Michael. She wasn’t close enough to see, but she called down in probably Jekhani, and the woman responded in kind.
“What’d she say?” Owen asked.
“She says she is Ona Estar.”
“Did you tell her you’re her daughter?” Luke put her COM against his ear, trying to make out the sounds he was hearing from the other end. Hauge’s voice was muffled, but Luke couldn’t hear any evidence of brutality.
“She doesn’t believe she has children, but she’s willing to do the genetic test.”
“Is she going to come up?”
Ais moved closer to the edge, but still didn’t look down. She rubbed Michael’s backside and cleared her throat before speaking again.
“What did you tell her?” Luke asked.
“Simply that no harm will come to her. The two of you couldn’t be very brutish if you’re escorting a woman with an infant.”
And, stunningly, the woman climbed up the ladder, pausing at the top.
Her face was almost completely shadowed by her hood, but he could see the peach of her skin and hints of fading red hair bunched around her neck.
“I…speak English.” Her voice was practically a whisper. A mother’s soft and careful tone often used when putting a restless child to bed or talking them down from some minor trauma. “Speak slowly. I learned from recordings.”
They stepped away from the ladder and gave the woman more room to climb up, though Owen did hold a hand down to her, which she took.
She was a tall woman, like most Jekhan women tended to be. She towered over Ais by at least a head, but in the light, Luke could see the resemblances. Ais’s eyes might have been red and Ona’s the color of amber fire, but the slant of them was the same. Their long, nimble fingers were the same. The very slight angling of the tips of their noses toward seven o’clock was the same.
Most importantly, in Luke’s opinion, their postures were identical. They both stood a bit too rigid and with their heads subtly tilted as they watched the other.
“You are small,” Ona said to Ais.
“I can
not help that.”
“Where were you born?”
“I do not know for certain. I was never told definitively.”
Ona grunted in the quiet way of mothers frustrated at their children’s inability to ask questions at the right times. That annoyance must have been universal across the galaxy. “How…many years do you have?”
“I am not certain when I was born. The Tyneali in the lab did not communicate such things to me. I had to guess many things. I believe I was born twenty-six years ago.”
Ona’s gaze fell to Michael and her brow furrowed.
“He is Owen’s,” Ais said in a rush, pointing to her husband. “We are married.”
“Made…on purpose?”
Owen sputtered. He was probably thinking the same thing Luke was.
Luke had to press his together tight to keep himself from laughing too loud. He was pretty sure he’d been present for the conception, and there’d been nothing planned about that evening.
“If you’re asking if we wanted a family,” Owen interjected, “then the answer is yes. He’s not an experiment. No one was hurt in making him.”
“They take.” Ona breathed out a sharp exhalation and traced one of Michael’s curls.
“Take what?” Luke asked.
“If we make, they take if alive,” she said. “Few lived for them to take.”
“The babies, you mean? They took your babies?”
She swallowed and dropped her hand. “If they lived.”
“I didn’t know,” Ais said. “We didn’t know how they… Or if they just took the eggs and…”
Ona gave her head a hard shake and tightened her cloak at the collar, staring out to the trees. “I thought I had one who lived, but they said no. They took her before she could nurse. They said that she wouldn’t last the day, but that they’d take her anyway.”
“Why?” Luke asked.
She looked at him as if she hadn’t noticed before that he was there. “Why?”
“Why would they lie? Why would they do this to you?”
She stared at him for a minute, maybe two.
Perhaps the question was obscene in some way. If so, Luke would apologize in every way he knew how, but at the moment, he was flying without a net. He was craving data, information.
Or perhaps the question was simply too big. Perhaps she couldn’t answer in a few words.
“We are not…people,” she said finally. “To them, we are not people.”
So obvious, and the truth hurt Luke’s soul. For a race to be so intelligent—so supposedly superior—the Tyneali did some incredible mental gymnastics to justify their inhumane behavior. If Satan had said, “I did it for science,” no one would have forgiven him, so why them?
Luke wouldn’t forgive them. Not ever.
Ona started moving toward the path they’d cut, and looked back over her shoulder. “This way? I would like to know for sure before I embrace you. I do not wish for heartbreak. You understand this?”
Ais nodded with wan smile, and followed. “Yes. I understand.”
Owen and Luke brought up the rear, and Owen let out a ragged exhalation.
“Shit,” Owen whispered.
Luke sucked in some air and curled his fingers into fists. “Fuck those aliens. I hope the good guys blow them out of space.”
“You’re assuming either side is truly good. We don’t know their motivations.”
“You’re right. Probably best to assume the worst of both from here on out. After all, in all those years, the good guys didn’t do anything to stop them. That means we have to be the good guys now.” He laughed. “Lord, help us.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Hey, Marc?” Jasper shouted.
He could have sworn he’d seen Marco hustling down the corridor of The Tin Can, but there was a slight chance he was seeing things. A few days after his nasty spill, he was taking a lot less of Dorro’s happy juice, but weaning off the stuff wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. His dreams were trippy. He’d had a nightmare about dancing tacos and had woken up in a sweat, hungry as hell, and wondering if there was something inherently evil about cilantro.
“Marc?” He called out again. “You in here?”
Instead of Marco’s thunderous bass in response came the telltale creaking of the metal floor in the hall.
Marco gave the door a tentative knock and then stuck his head into the room. There was soot on his cheeks and he had a pencil tucked behind his ear. He raised his eyebrows in a semi-greeting.
“Ha!” Jasper said. “So, I’m not seeing things.”
“What’d you think you saw?”
“Saw you walking past like you had the hounds of hell on your ass. Where’s the fire?”
“No fire. I heard the communications panel beeping and I was trying to catch the caller code readout before the display cleared.”
“Did you see who it was?”
Marco cleared his throat and fidgeted with a hole in his sleeve. The guy seemed squirrely for some reason. “Probably no one we know. Lately, when the panel beeps, we’re catching interference from travelers in space.”
“Ah. I see. Listen.” Jasper dragged his tongue across his dry lips and propped himself up on his elbows the best he could. Even with the painkillers, the throbbing of his hip nearly took his breath away. “Did Sera go home?”
“Sera?” Marco’s nod was so slow that Jasper was about to suggest he find a good oil to lubricate his uncooperative joints.
“She was here for a while, huh? I kept hoping she’d pop in and chat.”
Marco dragged a hand through his hair and leaned against the doorframe.
“Ah, hell. I don’t like the looks of that body language. What’s up?”
“Look. I gotta tell you something you’re not gonna wanna hear, but I owe you that much. Had the tables been turned, I’d want someone to tell me. So…”
“What, man? Spit it out.”
“I don’t want you to think this was planned or anything. I was as stunned by the way things came together as anyone is going to be, but still, I can’t help but to be a little flattered.”
“Marc, come on. Cut me some slack, okay? What the hell are you going on about?”
Marco pushed away from the door and threw up his hands. “Sera, man. I guess I’m with her.”
Jasper leaned onto his forearm and tried to shape those words into an order that made a little more sense. What Marco was saying didn’t make any sense. “What are you saying, Marco?”
“And by with her, I mean we’re a couple. I don’t know how better to explain. This isn’t something I’m used to.”
“With her.”
Unbelievable.
Jasper put his hand to back of his neck and rubbed hard, seeking the familiar distraction of shrapnel that may or may not have been there. When he’d been seventeen and his girlfriend had told him that going steady had been fun for a while but she didn’t see anything coming of it—that’d been the last time his ability to think and speak had been so shaken. In that conversation, he’d laughed off his dysfunction and said “Whatever” because that was what idiot seventeen-year-olds did, but Jasper was a grown-ass man. Blindsided though he’d been, he had to do a little better than “Whatever.”
He’d learned to articulate his feelings, even when he would have preferred not to share them.
Jasper dragged his tongue across his lips again and set down the notebook he’d been logging chemical analysis data into. Jack of All Trades, Lil used to call him, and she’d been a little bit right. He wasn’t as geeked about other branches of science as he was about chemistry and physics. He liked understanding how his weapons worked.
He would have been better off learning how people worked. Especially the people who were supposed to be his friends.
“I wasn’t pursuing her,” Marco said. “You’ve gotta believe that.”
“Right. And did this mutual liking start before or after I told you that I was going to try to start something with her?” Jasper se
t down the pencil he’d been holding, too. If he gripped the writing utensil any tighter, he was going to break the damned thing.
Marco pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes and his mouth tightened into a grimace. “I don’t think that’s so clear-cut, man. I wasn’t going to pursue her. I swear I wasn’t.”
“But what? You gonna tell me she came on to you?” Jasper scoffed. “Sorry if I sound skeptical, but I know how those Merridon sisters are.”
“Nobody really knows how they are.”
“Which means what?” Jasper spat.
Marco shrugged. Jasper had seen bulls with less aggressive shrugs than Marco. Obviously, he’d hit a sore spot, and it was nice to see that Mr. Nice Guy actually had one. He was having a hard time feeling any pity for him.
Marco dropped his hands from his eyes and shrugged again. “Long and short of it is that we get along, I guess, without having to try so hard and I guess I make her comfortable.”
“Comfortable.” Jasper nodded sardonically. The word shouldn’t have stung so much. Comfortable. That was what people called beta males. That was what women said about men they only wanted to be friends with. Apparently, something had changed without Jasper knowing. Apparently, “comfortable” was a good thing.
“That’s rich,” Jasper said. “Like I’m so fuckin’ hostile? Used to be that women didn’t like comfortable men. They liked dangerous men who could excite them.”
“Are you asking me to explain shit to you that I don’t really understand myself? Huh?”
“I guess I am, because the last time I checked, you weren’t sniffing around any particular lady, and all of a sudden, I got shut out from the exact person I was pursuing. That’s a hell of a coincidence.”
“You’re making out that I specifically went after her knowing that you were interested.”
“Did you?”
Marco threw up his hands and paced in front of the doorway like a caged tiger.
No, tigers were too small. More like a bear. A big, brawny Italian bear who’d been confined for too long and was starting to realize that he was a wild, dangerous thing.
“Come the fuck on, Jasper. Lil recruited you because you have a brain, so act like you do. I told you I had no plans. I had a leg up, is all. I was there when she and her sisters and all the women in their group were liberated. She’s been familiar with me longer than almost any other newcomer in Little Gitano, and she’s seen me almost every day for months. We eat meals at the same table more often than not.”