Billionaire's Holiday Bride: A Bad Boy Christmas Romance

by Serena Vale

  Shayla felt herself blush a little. Jake Thorne was one of the few billionaires on planet that had allowed his body to be mapped and reproduced in a holographic matrix for every woman on the planet to enjoy as long as they had the money to do so. Billionaires, even holographic ones, did not come cheap. Though Jake Thorne – the flesh and blood portion of him anyway – had died centuries ago, he remained a viral program in pleasure palaces across the planet and was still doing what men were reputed to be best at. Such was immortality for a rich man anymore.

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So?” Shuri asked incredulously as she crossed the sand to where Shayla was now standing on the wet sand. “There are real men out there that will climb your body like a jungle gym if you drop a quarter of what that simulacrum cost if you’d just grow a pair and do it! I could take you to one of those places right-the-hell-now if you want.”

  That Shuri knew where the local whore houses were, Shayla didn’t doubt. Most on-the-line combat soldiers knew such things and frequented such establishments. Nothing made someone want to fuck like the possibility that they might die tomorrow… or in a week… or a month… or even a year from now. That old adage about not finding virgins in fox holes was the rule on the planet anymore. Everyone could die in their beds so many found it worth their while to have sex while they could and for that there were whores aplenty in any city that someone wanted: usually because the options of livelihood outside of military service were slim at best. She couldn’t fault anyone for doing so either.

  But in truth, Shayla had had men before. There had been plenty of times when she’d had two or even three men bed her at once, and for nothing more than the thrill of it. Most of them had been whores who were willing to do anything she wanted as long as they got their bank accounts fattened a little more for their troubles. A few had been willing partners, men that she had known in the quartermaster’s corps with a couple of hours to kill and a conveniently empty room with blankets or sheets for them to lay upon.

  It had been fun the first few times she’d done it, but by the twelfth or thirteenth time, it felt like eating combat rations: she could eat it and survive, but there was nothing really nourishing about it. And she had developed numb taste buds for it, whether the sex was good or bad, she didn’t feel it. She had only done it for no reason other than because she’d had time to spare and nothing to do. The whole experience of it all, after all of this time, was only disappointing anymore.

  There was no thrill left in it.

  “Some other time, maybe,” she said, lightly kicking at the sand. “What’re you doing here anyway? I thought you were supposed to be on your rotation?”

  Shuri shook her head. “The Northern Block pushed our guys back last night. We lost the whole Ishkegi line. Deployments were put on hold while the brass assesses the damage.”

  Shayla nodded. The Ishkegi line was in the Congo, far north of where they were in Cape Town. She was no combat soldier, due to her size, but Shayla – like every other citizen of Earth that wanted to avoid prison or execution – had found ways to be useful. She had managed to prove that she was gifted at being a quartermaster, securing uniforms, blankets, weapons, and other supplies for people who had been made into line-grade soldiers. But a working knowledge of battle lines, who was friend or foe, and political ascents or descents, was critical to her position nonetheless. But however battle lines were redrawn didn’t directly affect her apart from knowing the kind of gear that soldiers would need when shipped to different parts of the country.

  The Ishkegi line, she knew, had been held by the native tribesmen there for some years before Earth started receiving help from off-world supporters. The line was like a kite in the wind, blowing back and forth so often that the land between it was almost destroyed. Were it not for the capacity of the jungle to grow back so fast it would have been nothing but barren lands even now. And the constant shifting of that line was due to the alien races that supported one side or the other.

  She almost snorted at the thought.

  There were a number of alien races out in the galaxy and many of them had come to Earth for a variety of purposes. Some had come for profit, others for exploration, and others – if she were to guess – was because humans were regarded somewhat as the ass-end of a bad joke in the galaxy. While governments the world over welcomed alien technology – weapons and other destructive forces – they had established laws for not allowing aliens to live on-world as immigrants, fearing alien influence on their society.

  It was just that kind of influence that had reshaped the world in the last eight hundred years or so. Some of the old superpowers in the world were now tourist attractions. Some places were now unlivable though they had been thriving once upon a time. Other places that had been uninhabitable were now overflowing with populace. And every country had its own off-world supporters, like sponsors for sports teams. And as a result, the new games of the recent centuries had been warfare. Pitiful third-world countries had become mega states and the old superpowers of ages before were nothing more than ruins and ash anymore.

  Shayla had her own thoughts about why aliens had come to her home world but she kept them to herself. None of those thoughts, however, painted their off-world supporters as particularly friendly.

  “So… what? You just decided to come down here and enjoy the sunshine instead of spreading your legs for a guy who’s only alive inside a computer chip somewhere?”

  Shuri shook her head. “Nope, although I would rather be there than out here… I spend enough time in the open as it is.”

  “Fair point. So…?”

  “The battalion C.O. sent me. He wants to see you. Now.”

  The South African Armed Forces HQ was located not far from the beach where Shayla had been. As it was nothing was far from the SAAF home base in this part of the world, so walking there had taken less than an hour. Shuri, of course, griped the whole way about how it would have been easier to get a hack or a hover pod to take them to HQ. But Shayla had refused on all counts, seeing as how her time to get away from technology – even for a little while – had been infringed upon.

  “Might as well enjoy what little time I have under the sun,” she said every time Shuri bitched about the heat.

  It was a small sting to administer so frequently, but Shayla enjoyed it. For as much time as Shuri spent in the field, Shayla spent indoors. Some would have thought that to be a lush and cushy assignment and while Shayla was appreciative – to an extent – that she didn’t have to go sloshing through rain forests or crawling through muddy banks, living indoors in a country as beautiful as this certainly didn’t rank high on her list of things to admire about her job.

  The SAAF building stood like a glass spire in a green landscape. The jungle had reclaimed much of what had once been a large city – another tool provided by the alien supporters of her country’s adversaries – and what little remained of human architecture was kept in check by the technology used by the aliens that supported her country.

  The building itself was circular in shape and capped in a tall communication spire that made it look like an inverted dart. It stood so tall that it was impossible to miss from a hundred kilometers away. The flag of her country was displayed prominently on the front of the building, standing out in stark contrast to the shining steel and glass that made the whole building glimmer like a beacon on a day like today.

  All around it, air cars and other hover craft flitted to and from it, reminding her of a bee hive that she had strayed too close to when she was young. And these bees, much like the ones she had seen in her youth, could be dangerous if an enemy came too close to this place.

  Walking all about the courtyard at the front of the building were other men and women in uniform. She saw no civilians among the throngs of people anywhere, which was a normal enough occurrence anymore since a “civilian” was anyone under the age of twelve.

  All of the people were dressed much like herself, in green uniforms and all with patches
on their shoulders that designated their particular functions. Most were soldiers, others were drones like herself. The slicker and more shapely figured people often became the combat soldiers while those like herself wound up doing the grunt work that largely went unnoticed until some combat unit or other didn’t get their socks or skivvies.

  She paid the collection of people very little attention as she and Shuri crossed the concrete courtyard and entered into the building proper. They were both retina-scanned for identification at the door and admitted before catching an elevator that took them to the top one hundred floors.

  Disembarking there they were met by two more soldiers marked with the tabs of on-site security. One of them was an old battle axe and the other was a little handsome, Shayla thought. But both of them had dead-serious looks on their faces that told her that neither was in the mood for social graces, however.

  “Shayla Umbetki?” the cute one asked.

  She nodded.

  “Come with us,” added the older one. He looked to Shuri. “Your job is done. We’ll handle it from here.”

  Shuri nodded and to Shayla she said, “If you survive, I’ll see you on the next rotation.”

  Shayla gave a quick smile to the skinny woman and followed the two soldiers as they walked on.

  Chapter 2

  Outside the windows of the building she could see Cape Town sprawling before her. Since the newly minted jungle plants that had overrun much of the city had overpowered some of the original concrete and steel structures, the city was protected by an electric frontier fence that kept the overreaching greenery at bay. On one side, the greenery of the wild jungle thrived as if it had been untouched by man since the dawn of time. On the other, a mere few meters from the edge of the protective barrier, was civilization. Houses, highways, storage facilities, and most importantly: military defensive structures. There were gun turrets, bunkers, artillery posts, landing pads, and like that that punctuated the perimeter fence like dashes and dots in the old Morse code along the line set by her commanders.

  Charming place, she thought wryly as she walked, preferring the green of the natural jungle to the site of concrete and industry.

  “Go inside,” said the old soldier. “The general is waiting.”

  The order brought her from out of her thoughts as she realized that they had come to a large pair of steel doors. The doors she recognized easily enough: breach gates. The kind that kings in a medieval world would have slaughtered whole countries to have on their castles. The doors were a centimeter thick, but could take anything from plasma discharges to nuclear blasts. A hardy material, that was.

  As she passed inside she got a good look at how the brass in this woman’s army lived. The office was, in her opinion, a waste of space. It was circular in shape, at least thirty meters across, and populated by nothing else but a desk, a chair, and the man who sat behind it. The floor was a holographic projector, she could tell that easily enough just by looking at it. High-class stuff too, considering that she knew mil-spec gear when she saw it. Likely the whole floor was rigged to display real-time maps of the continent and the placement of SAAF assets on the ground. But the imager was turned off for the moment.

  Her eyes went to the man behind the desk.

  He was even older than the soldier that had brought her into this place. His hair was cut short, even though he was as bald as an egg on top. He had wrinkles up and down his face that were offset by the single massive scar that he wore that stretched across his face from the lower part of his neck on his right hand side all the way up to his forehead on his left side. His right hand she saw was busy typing away on a tablet and she noted that it was a synthetic appendage.

  As she approached she noted that the nametag on the man’s uniform read “Haggart”. The rank he wore was Country General. Not only did he command the SAAF, but he ran the country as well.

  This is a first, she thought as she came to stand in front of the man’s desk. She put her heels together and saluted the man, standing up sharp and straight.

  The old general looked up from his tablet once at her, as if he didn’t care that she was standing there, before he looked back to his tablet with more interest. He didn’t return the salute… she knew he didn’t have to if he didn’t want to. But she, on the other hand, had to hold that posture until he told her to do otherwise.

  She waited.

  She counted the seconds that passed as the general went on typing away with his prosthetic hand, more engaged in that than with her. It was a while before the seconds became minutes. Minutes quickly turned into nearly an hour before the general finally gave a small sigh and set the tablet aside and looked at her patiently, like he’d been expecting her to get bored and turn and leave before he’d finished whatever it was that he was working on.

  “Stand easy,” he commanded.

  She dropped her salute, her arm feeling a little strange from being held upright for so long, and spread her feet apart to rest easy. She stared across the desk to the older man as he folded his hands, the real one over the synthetic, on his desk. He looked across at her and she could sense dislike radiating from the man as he looked on her, like how a housewife might look upon a cockroach invading a nice clean kitchen.

  “Shayla Umbetki,” he said, his voice dripping with scorn. “I’ve heard your name a lot lately. Specifically I’ve heard it no less than 87 times in the last three months. Do you know why?”

  She resisted the urge to smile. “Yes, sir, I do.”

  The general sighed and leaned back in his chair. “I’ve been studying your record. It’s pretty dull reading. You enlisted at age twelve, just like all honest citizens. Physically you weren’t fit to stand on the line, but you proved that you could get things done… joined the quartermaster’s corps. You were promoted to company quartermaster for the 58th by the time you were sixteen. And you’ve been there ever since.” He paused and regarded her with a careful eye. “You’ve been quiet about everything for the last nine years, since you were promoted. And then, all of a sudden…” he reached out and picked up the tablet he’d been tapping at on his desk, “I get this.”

  Again she resisted the temptation to smile. There could only be one reason why she was here now and the idea excited her like no other. It wasn’t a rejection, she knew. If her request had been rejected then she wouldn’t have been summoned here when simply not saying anything to her had worked well enough before now.

  It was approved! Jesus, it was approved! She found it hard to not want to dance and only barely managed to keep her discipline intact.

  He set the tablet back down. “You must want off this planet something fierce if you’re willing to put in so many applications to get off world… as a bride. Would you care to explain?”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” she said plainly.

  “That’s, ‘No, sir,’” he corrected her heatedly. He pointed out the tablet on his desk again. “All that this document lacks is my retinal scan, soldier. Until I do, you’re still a soldier and subject to my authority. So you’d better sharpen that point and get your shit wired straight and I mean right-the-hell-now!” he barked.

  She felt the sting of his words. Yes, she knew he was right. He could still say no to her request and make sure that she got busted back down to scrubbing latrines if he wanted. It was best to play the good soldier until then.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” she replied.

  “Better.”

  She took a short breath. “I simply want to get away from this planet, sir.”

  “Why?”

  “The world… it’s not the same.”

  “How would you know? The changes made to this planet were made before your great grandfather was a stirring in your great-great grandfather’s pants.”

  “I’ve studied the histories, sir. I know what life was like on this world before the first of the xeno races came. Nothing is as it was meant to be.”

  “Oh? You know how things were meant to turn out, do you? Are you omnipotent, so
ldier? If you are, then maybe I should refuse your request and keep you right here. You can predict the enemy movements and I’ll move our forces according to your predictions… like the heathen kings of old who were led by the words of soothsayers and witches, eh?”

  Again, the words bit at her, but she said nothing.

  “Perhaps you’d like to clarify your position,” the general said, folding his fingers together so that they steeple.

  She sighed. Just say it like you feel it, she told herself. It can’t get any clearer than that. “Sir, I’m sure you’ve studied the annuals of history?”

  He replied with a nod.

  “Then you know that Cape Town used to be part of the African continent. Now it’s an island… and we owe that to off worlders. The Sahara used to cover a third of the northern African continent and it used to be a desert… now its marine colony for fish and other lifeforms of the Mediterranean and Nigeria is beach-front property. The United Kingdom is a toxic wasteland. There are animals that live on this planet that went extinct millions of years ago, but they only live now because someone thought that they might make good weapons. There are insects imported from other planets because some head of state asked for them and for the same reason: they make good weapons. People used to have ships that sailed on the surface of the ocean before water-dwelling creatures from other worlds were brought in because they eat anything that swims or sails on the water.” She paused, finding that her words didn’t seem to be penetrating the hardened shell of the general. “Sir… the world is a testing ground combined with a blending pot for alien organisms. And our species is the one caught in the middle. The world isn’t natural anymore, sir.”

  “Again, I’m hearing the ring of omnipotence in your voice, quartermaster. How do you know what the world is supposed to be like?”

  “I don’t, sir,” she said quickly. “All I know is what it seems like to me. We pass laws that outlaw alien influence but we ask for their technology… their weapons… their insects… their animals… their plants… and they give them to us! Sir, Earth is nothing more than a firing range of other races! They’re fighting each other through us! We’ve changed our world by using what they give us! And now look at it!”