Rising Tides

by Rebecca Royce

  Rising Tides

  Wings of Artemis #10

  Rebecca Royce

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Rising Tides (Wings of Artemis #10)

  Copyright @ 2019 by Rebecca Royce

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-947672-79-6

  Print ISBN: 978-1-947672-80-2

  Cover art by Original Syn

  Content Editing: Heather Long

  Copy/Proofread Editing: Jennifer Jones at Bookends Editing

  Formatting: Ripley Proserpina

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work, in whole or in part, in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Rebecca Royce

  www.rebeccaroyce.com

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Prologue

  1. Doctor Chen

  2. Sweetness with the Sour

  3. The Art of Communication

  4. Explosions

  5. History Does Not Repeat Itself

  6. The Last Battle

  7. Feeling It

  8. A Ship Called Malice

  9. Did you hear that?

  10. A Nightmare

  11. Finally Home

  12. Reunited

  13. A New Endeavor

  14. Three of Fifteen

  15. Two Evander Ships

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Other books by Rebecca Royce…

  Prologue

  Dearest Reader,

  Thank you for taking this journey with Amber and me through the galaxy. This is book ten in the Wings of Artemis world and it takes us much closer toward the end of these stories. After this book, there will be two more for a total of twelve. I think you can probably guess at this point who our final heroine will be.

  Amber is a character very dear to me, and she has some pretty serious things to face in this book. When I’m writing, I frequently think of books as things other than their titles. Rising Tides to me became The Battle For Earth. It is more than that. It is the battle for who Amber is, who she wants to be, and what happens to her now that she is back where she never wanted to be again.

  Amber’s story is a second chance at love.

  Thank you for taking these trips through space and time with me,

  RR

  1 Doctor Chen

  Getting knocked over really sucked. But given that I had no choice, I pulled myself to my feet and let the dizziness of the last moment pass before I continued on my way. Brushing the dust off my arms, I trudged forward. The last bombing strafe had come way too close. Evander had started to make a real dent in our external shield barriers, and I wore the dust from the last near miss to prove it. I wiped myself again.

  It was my first day as an official doctor and nerves left me practically petrified. I’d almost not hit the dirt in time to avoid getting hit by debris.

  “Doctor Chen.” Brenden, the Z Warrior assigned to me rushed to my side. “That was close. Are you okay?”

  I shrugged even though I didn’t feel calm. There were eyes on me all the time. I needed to do a good job of keeping everyone calm. They looked to me for assurance. “Only my ego is bruised.”

  He cleared his throat, which I learned over the last five months meant he didn’t believe me but wouldn’t dare to speak his disagreement.

  I sighed. “Okay, my shoulder is kind of bruised, too.” And probably my behind, but I wasn’t going that far as to tell him that part.

  The Chen Empire was under constant attack. With no end in sight, we were going to have to figure ways to protect ourselves better. I pointed toward the medical facility. It looked like a small group of abandoned houses. We liked it that way, kept the Evander spaceships from targeting us. I hoped the steps the Super Soldiers had taken to disguise it from Evander scans before they left to go fight continued to hold up.

  “I have to go. Waverly is in labor.”

  “Oh.” My Z motioned me onward. He was coming with me. There was no way I’d get a break from one of them following me around today after my near miss. There were fifteen Z Warriors left on the Chen compound with the rest off fighting. Those who remained all seemed to be determined to make sure I stayed alive.

  “Brenden, after you deliver me to the medical facility, I need you to go see if you can find Dr. Ari Bennett. I’ll be fine inside. I won’t go anywhere. But I know he went underground to work with the hidden resistance and help with their injured. This is his wife. He needs to try to get here.”

  My Z warrior nodded once. “I’ll see what I can do. It can be hard in the tunnels, but I’ll try to find him.”

  If anyone could, it was Brenden. The young Z warrior had proved over these months a good friend to me. He’d almost convinced me I could have the Z around and not want to escape or suffer violent anxiety. Almost. I was sold on Brenden, just not the whole group.

  Waverly’s whimper greeted me as I entered the facility. She must have advanced quickly. I’d only received word she was in labor a few minutes earlier. Maybe she hadn’t come in quickly. She was a nurse, and she’d been nothing but busy since the fight began.

  I rushed to her. “Well, I might not be your first choice doctor. I think that blond husband of yours would fit that bill, but I’ll try to be a good number two.”

  She laughed, which was a good sign. “I thought maybe I could just do it. Women have babies all the time. You didn’t need to… Oh,” she cried out in pain. “Waste time and resources on me.”

  I rubbed her shoulder as I studied the machine’s read out. I’d love to get her off planet to have this baby, to put her on a spaceship going someplace like Venus, and give her some semblance of safety to give birth, but it was way too late for that now.

  “Don’t be silly. This is where you belong, always.”

  Hers was not going to be the first baby I’d delivered. War didn’t stop women having babies. It just made it more complicated to keep them all safe after.

  I took off my coat and set it aside. I needed to clean up and then offer her what relief I could. “So talking to you is different than talking to someone who isn’t in this with us. Should I give you the speech?”

  Waverly laughed, it was a good sound. I looked up at her scans. Mother and baby were holding on just fine. She’d had her first child, Emerson, her son with her husband Rohan, not so long ago. There was every reason to believe that this was going to go just fine. Although every pregnancy was different. I washed my hands in hot water, staring at the tap.

  The water. In the Chen Empire it was all about the water. Every day I was here taught me more and more what being guardians of the water meant to the people. When I’d lived here the first time I’d given it no thought, but now evidence of their care for it was everywhere, like my eyes were new, seeing everything differently.

  “Maybe if we’d spent more time as a society.” She groaned, a long sound. “Seeing to the needs of women instead of bartering us off like chattel we’d have an easier time giving birth.”

  Our methods for childbirth weren
’t better than they were before the bombs. On the rural planets, what few women there were regularly died in the act. But Waverly would be fine because she had me here.

  I touched her arm. “I think there are a lot of things we could have done differently.”

  She smiled at me. “Maybe it’s starting. Maybe you being a full-fledged doctor now is just the start of how things can change.”

  I pulled her into a hug. Pregnant women needed lots of touch. Waverly didn’t have the father of her baby here. He was off fighting a war for all of us. Her one husband remaining was underground helping a resistance. She just had me. And I would not let her down.

  “I’m going to take really good care of you. You’re not alone. I’m here. Now, let’s check you guys out and see what we can do to relieve some of your pain. If we need to, I’ll knock you out, deliver the little guy, and heal you up in the machine. Hopefully, we won’t need to do it.”

  She nodded, wiping tears from her eyes. “This will end, right?”

  “Yes, I mean, it’s hard to tell from the scans, but I’d say we’re just hours from seeing your son…”

  She shook her head. “Good to know, but no. I mean, the war? It’ll end. Jackson, Canyon, Rohan, they’ll come home. Ari won’t have to keep leaving. Evander will go. We’ll all get to go home, right?”

  “Absolutely.” I nodded my head. “One hundred percent right. They’re all coming back.”

  I hadn’t seen my husbands since they’d left. Not one single moment with them. The others had moments. Jackson had come through two months ago on a ship that needed to be repaired. Canyon and Rohan were on a shuttle of Super Soldiers who came for supplies. Waverly saw Ari several times a week.

  My sister’s husbands had each flown through once so far. Diana’s Lewis came through a lot. He wasn’t far. There were shelter points all over Earth and Lewis was close. He treated patients and sent them here once they were stable. He was here every few weeks. Sterling had come with Rohan and Canyon. Cash had only left recently on a shuttle. And Damian had made it home twice.

  Melissa wasn’t here, she was off fighting. Some of their kids were here with Diana and they all came through.

  I didn’t mean to be jealous, I didn’t like the part of me harboring those thoughts, but I was the only one I knew who hadn’t had one moment with her husbands since they’d left. Not one word in five months, not one glimpse of them.

  With Evander jamming all the signals here, I hadn’t even heard their voices.

  I smiled at Waverly. I was still so good at faking it and no one required a good dose of calm and happy more than a woman about to give birth. “Let’s meet your son today, shall we? And then when Jackson, Rohan, and Canyon come back, and Ari gets up from the tunnels, they’ll be so proud of how brave you were.”

  She smiled at me through the tears. “I’m ready.”

  Ari burst through the door just as I’d gotten Waverly settled and Mason, the newest member of our group of family and friends, sleeping on her chest. I put up my hand.

  “Congratulations. Go wash your hands before you touch either of them.”

  He blinked, Ari was in full on panicked new father mode. Mason wasn’t biologically his son, but that didn’t matter in our family groups. He loved him like he was. The doctor bled back into his gaze, leaving the terrified father nowhere to be seen. “Right. I’ll sterilize.”

  “We’re not going anywhere, love,” Waverly spoke in a low voice. “And Diana has Emerson. He’s safe down below.”

  “Right.” Ari took off his coat, throwing it aside and rushing to the same sink I’d cleaned up in earlier. “You’re okay. You are. You’re okay.” He spoke like he needed to say it a few times to believe it. “I wasn’t here but Amber was and she is the best doctor, maybe ever. Certainly the fastest to ever become one. We couldn’t believe it when you passed everything so fast.”

  I shook my head. “Good teachers.” Even as I answered him, I kept my gaze fastened on the readouts from the med machine. Both mommy and baby were fine. They would stay that way and I’d watch to make sure for a while yet. “She was very brave, very strong.”

  Ari grinned at the sink. “Of course she was. She always is.”

  I wished I could leave and give them privacy. But someone had to read the screen, and Ari was really not to be trusted to be rational at the moment. I hit a button, sending the signal outside the room to the screen in the hall.

  He walked over to his wife, kissing her soundly on the lips before he stared down at their new arrival. “Why hello there. What did you name him?”

  Didn’t he know? She’d said it so fast when he was born I’d assumed they’d discussed it.

  “This is Mason.”

  I closed the door, not surprised to find the all of the remaining Zansi Warriors, the Z as they were more regularly referred to, standing outside. They’d done this with the other babies born, too. The Z loved babies. Actually, the whole Chen Empire did. Any baby born here was automatically granted Chen Empire status, whether their parents were or not.

  The fifteen Z stared at me, equal questions in all their gazes. It had freaked me out the first time they’d done this. Any kind of gathering of the Z used to mean violence to me. Now… it was complicated. They were loyal to my husbands and that meant more than anything else in the universe.

  “Healthy baby boy.”

  Grins broke out on their usually stoic faces before they covered. Brenden spoke to me, quietly. The task always seemed to fall to him, as though he’d become their voice. “And his mother?”

  “Mason is his name, and Waverly is well. You guys all know Ari by now. He’s in there. Thanks for getting him, Brenden, and I’m going to give them some privacy by watching out here.”

  Someone cleared his throat and a second later, Wade Moyer stepped through the crowd. He was a doctor, and although I hadn’t known him well on The Farm, since coming to Earth he had become my friend. He was recently back from time on a spaceship fighting in several battles. Once, Evander had imprisoned him while a man dubbed Doctor Disease impersonated him. He’d nearly killed Waverly and ended up sending her through space and time in the process. Later, Sterling and Damian had rescued Wade on a mission to free a nearby planet being imprisoned by Evander.

  The real Wade had come back. He was quiet but really good at medicine and devoted to taking care of his brother and sister who he was solely responsible for since the death of their parents.

  “Need help, Dr. Chen?”

  With Cash and Lewis gone, it was Wade who’d officially made me a doctor two months before. I’d been an intern until today, needing to be supervised by one of the other doctors. None of this was the way it was usually done, but unusual times called for unusual measures. Today, I’d earned my right to treat patients alone.

  I pointed to the screen. “Just going to monitor.”

  “When was the last time you slept?” Wade looked at the monitor with me and lowered his voice. “And you’re overdue for your own treatments.”

  I lifted my brow. “Slept? Does anyone sleep? It’s constant. I think we need to get Waverly and the baby out of here sooner rather than later. I hate to move them just yet, but they need to go down below to the safety zone. And as for my treatment, I’ll say what I’ve said before, there are more important uses of the med machines right now.”

  Wade turned to look at the Z Warriors. “Could you guys give me a minute to speak to Dr. Chen?”

  None of them moved. It was Brenden who answered again. “If you have concerns for Dr. Chen’s health, then we need to be aware of them. We can see to it that she gets what she needs. It is our solemn, sworn duty and our privilege to see to Dr. Chen while the Masters Chen are away.”

  I held up my hand. The secret of my infertility was not a secret anymore. Hadn’t been for some time. I had to explain my time in the med machines or the Z freaked out. My condition was painful but not life threatening, at least not yet.

  “I’m fine. Wade is concerned with my pain. That
is very kind of him but this isn’t life or death.”

  The other doctor shook his head. “Maybe not yet. But if you leave it too long, it could eventually result in emergency surgery and a life or death situation at that point. You’re lucky you were okay as long as you were without treatment. Things are clear now. No current emergencies. Waverly is doing fine. Ari can watch his wife and new baby if you point out he has to. And I can put you in the med machine, give you your treatment, and then, while the coast is still clear, you can recover from the treatment. Don’t make me get Ari to sign off on benching you for days.”

  I sighed. “You’d do that, wouldn’t you?”

  “You have to take care of yourself so you can take care of others. I have to remind myself of this constantly. Trust me, I get it.”

  Wade had secrets. As far as I knew, he didn’t have medical conditions he treated himself for. I wasn’t going to ask him in front of the whole parade of Z. I had to have my personal life open for inspection, it came with being married to Amari, Hunter, and Shane. Wade didn’t.

  “Okay. Let’s do this.”

  The med bay buzzed with machines. Only one third of them were in use so Wade was right. It was an easy night. Of course, we could have a hundred ships of wounded show up any minute. I shivered. I couldn’t let myself think like that or I’d never get in it.

  “Are you going to remind Ari to move Waverly?” I asked Wade as I chewed on my thumbnail.

  “Already done.” He grinned. “You’d think I hadn’t done this for the last five years.”

  I shrugged. “Sorry. I’m pretty much alone here as the only doctor. The medical assistants are great and so are the three nurses, but since you officially made me one of you, it’s been just me.”