Red Gambit: Book One of the Harvesters Series

by Luke R. Mitchell

  “What the hell is that thing?”

  He followed her gaze and gave the giant sword an affectionate pat. “It’s my Big Whacker.”

  Of course it was. Talk about overcompensation. The thing looked far too heavy to be effectively wielded, but maybe that was where this suit of his came in.

  Rachel eyed the rest of the ship. The bare-bones kitchen space and the separate compartment that must’ve been a small bathroom were the last stops before the bulkhead that separated the cabin from the cockpit.

  “So you live here?” she asked.

  “Sometimes, yeah.” Jarek ran a hand through the back of his hair. “Most of the time, I guess.”

  She stared at him. “Who are you?”

  He shrugged. “I’m awesome. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Not what I was implying.”

  Michael cleared his throat. “It’s a heck of a ship, Jarek.”

  “Yeah,” she said, her tone flat. “Really cool. Seriously.”

  “Oh, bite me, you wiener hats,” Jarek said. “And I’ll remind you that you don’t need to be here, Goldilocks. I’m not even rightly sure I remember anyone inviting you. Feel free to step off at any time.”

  “Happy to, just as soon as Michael steps off with me.”

  He threw his hands up and turned for the cockpit. “It’s like my life is stuck on some shitty broken record.” From the cockpit, he called, “Come strap in for takeoff. Or don’t. See if I care.”

  “‘Weiner hats,’” Michael murmured beside her. “What does that even mean?”

  “I don’t know. But you totally are one.”

  “Glad to see we’re all going to be mature adults on this trip.”

  She stalked up to the cockpit.

  The cockpit only had proper seats for two, the pilot and the copilot, but there were benches against the bulkhead to either side of the doorway, complete with harnesses in case the ride got bumpy. She eyed Jarek lounging in the captain’s chair, then turned to plop down on the left bench.

  “Prepare for takeoff, Al,” Jarek said. “Whoa!” he added as Michael came into the cockpit and moved to the copilot’s chair.

  “What?” Michael said.

  “That’s Al’s chair, muchacho. Show some respect.”

  Michael shot her a confused look. “Oh, uh, sorry.”

  “Oh, really, sir,” Al said through the cockpit speakers.

  Jarek regarded Michael with a stern expression. Then his face cracked into a smile. “Just screwin’ with you, Mikey. Whaddaya think, I’m some kind of crazy person? Strap in.”

  Michael did so, moving far more cautiously than the task merited.

  “You secure back there, Goldilocks?” Jarek asked. “God forbid we lose you.”

  She pulled on her harness, shot him her sweetest smile, and gave him a middle-fingered thumbs-up.

  Jarek beamed at her, then stomped one of the pedals in front of him.

  Rachel’s stomach lurched as the ship shot smoothly into the air. Jarek peered over his shoulder, winked, and turned back to the controls. The whooshing sensation in her abdomen shifted directions as the ship accelerated forward and banked to the left.

  Maybe his heart was in the right place (she still wasn’t sold on Pryce’s word there), but that didn’t make Jarek any less of an asshole.

  They leveled out of the turn and continued accelerating.

  “All yours, Al,” Jarek said. “To Deadwood, we go.”

  “Got it, sir. We can be there in as little as three hours.”

  Jarek unfastened his harness. “No hurry. Just wanted to clear Newark before anyone with eyes could see us. No reason to show up knocking on Weston’s door at five in the morning over there.” He looked back at Michael and Rachel. “You guys might as well get some sleep if you can.”

  As lovely as that sounded, she had a bullet catcher that needed finishing.

  “Maybe we should figure out what the plan is before we get there,” Michael said.

  Jarek rolled his eyes. “Don’t be such a boy scout, boy scout. We’ll tell the guy what’s up. And if that’s not good enough, we’ll knock his ass out and drag him back with us. Shit, I don’t know. It’ll be fine.”

  “And what if it’s not?” Michael said. “What if he’s armed and not agreeable? What if he’s not even there? What if he’s surrounded by civilians and decides to put up a fight?”

  “Or,” Jarek said, “what if he’s surrounded by innocent, armed civilians riding giant teddy bears with gumdrops for eyes? Then we’re really screwed.”

  Michael’s brows knitted together. “What? The point is, we have no idea what we’re walking into here, so we need to be ready for anything.”

  “Well, yeah,” Jarek said. “Hence the giant gumdrop-eyed teddy bear mount contingency.”

  Michael’s peaceful exterior was beginning to crack.

  “Boys …” she said.

  Michael stood. “You’re a real handful, you know that?” He left the cockpit before anything more could spill out.

  Jarek watched him go, trying and failing to contain a grin.

  She scowled at him and leaned over to glance into the back cabin. Michael had plopped down into the recliner, arms crossed moodily across his chest. Irritated as he was, she knew he’d be asleep within minutes. The Spongehead had always slept like a rock.

  She, on the other hand, would not be asleep within minutes, which meant she’d be stuck with Jarek Slater. Wonderful.

  “I’m using your shower,” she announced.

  “Need help?” Jarek said. “It can get awfully confusing in there with all those dials and knobbies.”

  “Somehow, I think I’ll find a way.”

  Cramped and lukewarm as it was, the shower was a godsend. It had been what, two days? Three? Too long, for sure. There’d been too much. Everything was blending together into one long, unpleasant trip. However many days it had been, it felt pretty damn good to be at least half clean for a few minutes. Returning to her dirty clothes tarnished the experience, but it was still something.

  Michael was lightly snoring when she stepped out of the tiny bathroom, and Jarek was standing in the dim cabin, stripping off his dark, torn Henley. She caught a glimpse of a morbidly mesmerizing collection of scars on his lean, well-muscled torso.

  Then he shot a wink at her, and she headed for the cockpit with a sigh.

  There didn’t seem to be any obvious work surfaces on the ship, so she settled down on the floor facing one of the benches and began unpacking the scraps she’d scrounged from Pryce’s odd emporium.

  Jarek stalked into the small bathroom and thumped around in the shower for a few minutes, whistling a tune she didn’t recognize. A few minutes later, he plopped down in the pilot’s chair sporting a fresh maroon Henley and smelling of soap and deodorant. He proceeded to occupy himself with some stupid game on his comm holo.

  “You can do that over here,” he said some time later, tapping at the flat space of the console in front of the copilot’s chair. “Whatever that is.”

  She didn’t look away from the glyph she was etching. “It’s called enchanting in most circles. And I’m fine down here.”

  “Oh, right. Enchanting. Should’ve known. So what’re you—”

  “Getting ready to make another one of these.” She held up her own bullet catcher. “It basically detects incoming bullets and stops them if they’re gonna hit the person who’s wearing it.”

  He swiveled his chair around, interested now. “So that’s how you were doing that. You know, I’ve deflected a few bullets with a sword before …”

  “Not without help,” Al said quietly. “And it’s hardly proved practical, sir.”

  Jarek frowned at the disembodied voice. “Whose side are you on again, Mr. Robot?”

  “I’m trying to keep my brother alive,” she said, “not win a competition.”

  “It’s still a competition, Goldilocks. I’m just not your opponent.”

  She met his eyes. Was that true? It was and it wa
sn’t, depending on how she looked at it. She turned back to her work.

  “So how does it work?” he said after a while.

  She put the final touches on a glyph in the shape of an eye before looking up. “In a nutshell, it’s kind of like writing code. Except instead of text commands, I use glyphs. Then I power them up. It’s complicated.”

  He scooted over to the adjacent bench and picked up her own catcher for inspection. “And you can track an incoming bullet with a few of these glyphs? I’m not a physicist or anything, but that sounds like some complicated shit to parse out.”

  “Well said, sir,” Al said. “I was wondering the same thing, though.”

  Rachel allowed herself a small smile. “A lot of it comes down to how accurately I can focus my intention when I empower each glyph.”

  “Sounds quite subjective,” Al said.

  “There’s a reason I was still scared to get shot at.”

  “Wimp,” Jarek said.

  She rolled her eyes.

  “So all of this comes down to energy in and energy out?” Jarek asked.

  “If you’re really good, yeah, but most arcanists tend to waste a lot of energy, even on the basic stuff.”

  “And how many arcanists would that be, roughly?” Al said.

  “You’re awfully curious about all this for a robot and a hardened mercenary,” Rachel said.

  “Well, you’re our first,” Jarek said, wiggling his eyebrows. “Plus Pryce would kill us if we didn’t come back with answers to some of his questions. The guy has so many of them.”

  She set down the piece she was working on and rotated to face Jarek. “I’ve only ever met three other arcanists, the one who helped train me when I was young and two who passed through Unity a grand total of three times over fifteen years. So I don’t think there are that many of us around these days, if there ever were.”

  “Is it an inherited trait?” Al asked.

  “Christ, I don’t know.” She waved impatiently. “I’m not a professor of arcanism. But my mother was gifted too, so maybe.”

  She started etching the last glyph in the silence that followed.

  “So even if it’s energy in versus energy out,” Jarek said, “there’s gotta be some kind of limit, right? That’s one of Pryce’s favorite thought experiments. I listened to him ramble for half an hour one time about how you guys must essentially be like power lines.”

  “He’s a clever man.”

  “And he knows it. So what does it feel like, being a power line?”

  She finished the glyph and set her tool down. “Channeling. That’s what we call it. It’s kind of like a shock that pours through your entire body, like this wave of … not heat, I guess, but—”

  “Energy?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Let’s go with that.”

  “Kinda sounds like an orgasm gone horribly wrong.”

  She snorted. “Jesus, you’re a child. I dunno, the light stuff can actually be kind of soothing once you get used to it, but it gets pretty intense when I cut loose.”

  He gave her a wolfish grin. “You’re not really disproving the comparison.”

  There was no avoiding it: anything she said at that point could and would be used against her in a court of bad innuendoes.

  Al cleared his throat, despite presumably not having one. “Is it dangerous? Channeling more energy than you’re equipped to handle?”

  “So I hear,” she said. “I passed out once when my eyes were bigger than my battery, so to speak, but apparently people have died from that kind of thing before. Hearts giving out and such.”

  “It just gets better and better.” Jarek said.

  She narrowed her eyes at him.

  “So your mom,” he said. “Was that before the Catastrophe?”

  She stiffened and mentally cursed as she realized she’d started rubbing at her left forearm with her thumb. She occupied her hands with packing up the pieces of the new catcher. With the engraving done, the next steps would require careful focus, and she clearly wasn’t going to find that here.

  He held his hands up. “Whoa! It’s okay. Forget I asked.”

  “Sorry, I just—”

  “I get it.” He shifted to bring his legs up on the bench and rest his back against the wall. “We should try to get some sleep. Why don’t you take my bed for a couple hours?”

  She arched an eyebrow at him.

  He held up his hands. “No funny business. You know, unless you’re asking for it.”

  She held his gaze, searching for her retort. Seconds passed. Why didn’t he look away? Why didn’t she? What did it say about her that his eyes drew her like magnets even after she’d seen him cut half a dozen throats last night?

  It didn’t matter. Whatever awful ideas her libido might have, she would stomp them out like the destructive pests they were. Besides, she had work to do, work that she might actually get done if he’d shut up and go sleep on his cot.

  “I’m not stealing your sorry excuse for a bed,” she said. “I can rough it just as well as you.”

  “I dunno, I like it pretty rough.”

  “It never ends with you, does it?”

  He nestled his head against the back corner of the cockpit and closed his eyes. “It always ends with me.”

  It didn’t sound like a cute joke.

  She studied the lines of his face. What was he talking about? Banter? Relationships? Or something else entirely? Something told her it was the latter. The demons he must be carrying on his back—

  He opened one eye. “Go. Sleep.”

  She shook her head and turned back to the beginnings of the catcher on the bench in front of her. “Take the cot, you chauvinist pig. I have work to do.”

  He smiled but made no sign of moving.

  “Much as I hate to interrupt,” Al said. “I thought you two might like to know that we’ll be encountering some turbulence ahead.”

  She suppressed a dark urge to laugh.

  If only Al could tell her something she didn’t know.

  Thirteen

  Deadwood, South Dakota, was the alleged birthplace and long-time home of Alaric Weston and, according to Pryce, the one place the man would’ve run to after the metaphorical shit had hit. Studying the town in front of him, Jarek could see why. By all appearances, Deadwood was a charming, thriving little town. That wasn’t something people got to say much these days.

  At the time of the last pre-Catastrophe census, Deadwood’s population had been about fifteen hundred. Who knew how those numbers had held up over the past fifteen years, but enough homes and stores and cars looked in good repair down there for him to believe Deadwood had simply gone on living in its cozy little mountain valley.

  Michael and Rachel plodded down the boarding ramp behind him.

  They both looked tired, even though Michael had slept straight through the entire flight.

  Jarek had woken long enough to (unnecessarily) direct Al to set the ship down on the southern crest nestled between the two forks of the Y-shaped valley in which Deadwood had been built. After that, he’d grabbed a few more hours of sleep before coming out to scout.

  Rachel had still been blearily, stubbornly awake when he’d risen the first time. He’d felt some small satisfaction to find her curled up in his cot when he’d woken the second time, but judging from the pallor in her face, she must’ve risen to get back to her enchanting since Jarek had left the ship. Or maybe she was just that tired.

  “How’s it look?” Michael said, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

  “Oddly intact,” he said, “except for the fact that I haven’t seen a single damn person for the past half hour.”

  There’d been a bustle of activity in the streets below when he’d first risen to look, but it hadn’t lasted long. Everyone had seemed to be headed to—

  “Church,” Michael said. “It’s Sunday.”

  Son of a bitch. Of course he hadn’t thought of that. Attending church had become a dangerous practice in most places once the
marauders caught on that Sunday services made easy targets. But up here in the mountains, far removed from what population hot spots remained, it made sense.

  “Where were you on that one?” he murmured softly.

  Al made a sniffing sound in his earpiece. “Perhaps if I had proper eyes out there and wasn’t relying on your hodgepodge scouting report, sir.”

  Reason 5,093 they needed to get Fela back.

  Now that he was closer, Michael’s dark features looked reserved but not overtly unfriendly. Nothing like a beauty sleep to cure a bad case of the mopes.

  “Church, sure. Good call, choirboy.”

  Michael reached for Jarek’s binoculars. “There’s no winning with you, is there?”

  “Nope!” He handed Michael the binoculars and turned to Rachel. “You look like you need a cookie.”

  She gave a noncommittal grunt by way of reply.

  “Touché.”

  He pushed past her to walk back to the ship and went to the locker in his cabin. He patted the giant blade of the Big Whacker affectionately, and then he withdrew his black synthetic gun belt from his box of goodies and strapped it on, drawing the holster straps snug on his thighs. His trusty old Glocks and a couple of extra mags were still loaded in the belt from last night, but he grabbed a third pistol and an additional mag for Michael.

  Before shutting the locker, he paused, gazing thoughtfully first at the firearms on his person and then at the smaller sword resting in the vertical space inside the locker. They were just going to talk …

  Ah, hell, how often did that work out? Plus, his ammo stockpile wasn’t going to last forever.

  He slung the sword over his shoulder, closed the locker, and went to join the others.

  Outside, Rachel eyed his armaments dubiously, her eyes lingering on the hilt of the sword. It was a good blade, one of his favorites—formed from a single piece of steel with a straight, medium-length blade and a no-frills hilt wrapped tightly with thin green paracord for grip and thickness. It had been a gift of sorts from Pryce shortly after they’d met.

  Michael’s eyes widened in surprise or maybe horror when he turned and got a good look. “Dude, we’re not looking to pick a fight here! And a sword? Seriously? Why?”