Crystal studied him silently for a few minutes. Did he really think of himself that way? He certainly didn’t have the attributes that she’d like any of her mates to have, but she didn’t think of him as a lost cause. She thought misdirected was a better descriptor.
If he would focus some of his negative energy into something good, he’d be capable of achieving great things. His charisma and street smarts could take him far in the military, but she worried his belligerence would prevent him from achieving a high rank, which sometimes seemed like outright rebellious behavior against his military fathers.
No, she didn’t think he was a lost cause, but he was correct in one regard. They were military first, and a good soldier always put aside her personal feelings to obey orders. Crystal needed to suppress her doubts about the justice of the current situation with the Council in order to do her job, even though using intel she’d gathered from Henri and Stepho made her ill.
What if her military orders led directly to the deaths of her intimate partners? Where was the honor in that?
As she shredded lettuce leaves and dropped them into a large bowl for a salad, she choked back the bile in her throat, trying to steer clear of where the answers were leading her.
She had to put on her good soldier persona and focus on following orders without questioning those in authority, and finish the preparations for the midday meal while ignoring the risk she was putting Henri and Stepho in.
Sure, that would be as easy as picking berries out of Profortuna’s unbreathable air.
Giving the frying mushrooms a stir, Fisher glanced over at Crystal as she ripped into another head of lettuce. She had no clue what made him tick. Her perceptions of him were only what he chose to show others. Wouldn’t she be surprised to learn what he really wanted?
What she saw as his defiance of authority was actually his back-assward way of asking for something he’d never got, something that made his self-protective defenses flare until he acted like an insolent blaster.
He’d nearly given up finding someone who could fill that kernel of need in his core. Instead, he tried to fill the damn empty spot with plenty of sex, which wasn’t what he truly desired. Sex couldn’t satisfy this need.
Then Fisher had observed Henri with Crystal, and he’d recognized the other man’s dominant side. But Crystal had squashed any of Fisher’s ideas about joining her and Henri when she’d dropped Fisher immediately after reconnecting with the two intelligentsias. Obviously, he hadn’t meant anything more to her than a provider of a few good orgasms.
Fisher stared down at the pan of mushrooms that were beginning to burn.
Yeah, he was just a dumb fuck-up just like his fathers’ had always told him.
* * * *
“Here you go, Doctor Zeke. It’s your favorite.” Crystal smiled as she handed the chemist a plate of vegetarian lasagna for the evening meal; meat was becoming scarcer with the greater demand of feeding First Quadrant. She was having to rely more heavily on plant-based protein and dairy from the cows in Fourth Quadrant.
“Thanks. Mmm. This smells as good as always,” the small man complimented her as he walked away to sit at a table with some of his fellow chemists.
“Crystal, when are you making that baked dish again with the fish and the little noodles?” The physicist, Doctor Brentan, asked as he stepped up to the service counter next.
She laughed companionably. “You mean my tuna noodle casserole?” It was an ancient recipe she’d found in the history database when she was looking for new ideas for the menu. “As soon as the next batch of tuna grows large enough to harvest.”
“How long before a tuna matures?”
“About a year and a half.”
Behind his glasses, his eyes grew large. “You can’t make tuna noodle casserole for another year and a half?”
She chuckled. “No worries, Doctor. The Food Producers breed them in cycles. We should have our next shipment in another moon cycle.” She handed him a plate full of lasagna.
“Another moon cycle,” he grumbled as he turned away with his meal.
After more than a moon cycle preparing meals for the intelligentsia in sector one, Crystal was coming to know quite of few of them by name and their favorite dishes. She was glad of the friendly faces greeting her across the service counter because working in the kitchen with Bad Attitude Fisher was wearing on her nerves.
Thank the stars, she had Henri and Stepho to return to every night. They knew how to get her mind off of her moody sous-chef, who hadn’t taken too well to her calling an end to their intimate relationship, but a part of her missed the challenge of being with Fisher. She was different with him than she was with Henri and Stepho.
With Henri, she could give over to her submissive side and relax into his control, which was a welcome relief from always trying so hard to prove herself in her military life. Whereas, Stepho brought out her softer side as she reacted to his sensitiveness. He was acutely responsive to the feelings of Henri and Crystal—when he wasn’t absorbed in his single-minded research mode.
Then there was Fisher. In all honesty, she enjoyed their sparring. She liked that she was able to be her strong self with him. She didn’t have to hold back on the rougher side of her personality. He met her squarely in the same place.
If only she could have all three of them…
“Oh no, Crystal,” Doctor Bella, mathematician extraordinaire, groaned as she stepped up to the counter for her plate, pulling Crystal out of her daydream. “Not pasta again. You’re making me fat.”
“Ha! Not a chance, Bella. Besides, I don’t think those three brawny mates of yours would mind a little extra meat on your bones.”
Bella grinned conspiratorially at Crystal. “I’m afraid they won’t let me leave the bed if I get any curvier.”
“Well, hellitude then. Let me give you a double serving.” Crystal laughed with her new friend, who’d managed to get the Council to agree to her mating with three members of Fourth Quadrant’s special security force after the men had acted as her bodyguards during the initial OAS attacks.
Their mutual friend, Doctor Anna, had also been mated with three members of the military, but the Council had assigned them before the attacks when they’d heard rumors of the possibility of danger. The Council had hoped to keep their elite bio-researcher safely protected by three high-ranking Generals. The men had brought Anna to Fourth Quadrant, where Crystal had met her and helped introduce her to the Food Producers. Anna was working on some theories on the link between whole foods and increased fertility rates.
“Stars, no!” Bella pulled her plate away before Crystal could add a second slice of lasagna. “I enjoy my work too much to be tied to the bed.”
“Oooh, now there’s a delicious thought,” Crystal teased.
Bella chuckled as she turned to leave the line. “You’re a bad influence,” she murmured as she walked away.
Crystal wondered if there was any validity to the whispers that Bella and her three military mates were involved with the Pro-Freedom Movement at a key level. Her stomach soured as she considered turning her friend over to the Council.
How could good people like Bella, Henri, and Stepho be on the wrong side of this conflict? And how could Crystal live with herself if she caused the deaths of other good people like them and later learned that she’d been working for the wrong people?
Chapter Five
“What’s going on out there, Fisher?” Crystal waved at the growing crowd in the cafeteria. It was exactly halfway between the midday and evening meals, a time when the cafeteria was usually empty, except for a few people who liked to take a break from work and talk over a hot beverage from the self-service station.
“Looks like a public gathering of protestors,” Fisher said, leaning over the service counter to get a better look. “By my count, there are about forty people.”
Demonstration crowds had been reported with growing frequency in other sectors of First Quadrant during the past two moon cycles,
but Crystal hadn’t heard of any in sector one, until now. What surprised her the most was that civilians of the manufacturing and engineering classes intermingled with members of the intelligentsia. They all seemed to share the same goals as small clusters gathered in hushed, but intense, conversations.
Crystal gave these men and women a lot of credit for their bravery, or perhaps they were merely foolish. Each of them risked capital punishment just by being in this room, as the Council had already sentenced several members of the Open Air Society to death for treason.
Crystal scanned the room, watching for any signs of trouble, but the crowd was calm. The differences between the classes was obvious by their uniform colors—intelligentsia in beige, manufacturing in black, and engineering in dark brown—but it didn’t seem to interfere with the communication between them. She recognized several of her regular customers among the crowd, including Doctors Zeke and Brentan.
Fisher nudged her with an elbow in her side and nodded in the direction of the hallway entrance directly across from them. “We’ve got company.”
Crystal quickly identified the olive uniforms of the Council Guards on the five-man team entering the cafeteria. “Oh shiitake, do you think they’re going to arrest all these people?”
Fisher shrugged. “They’re kind of outnumbered for that.”
“This is an unlawful gathering,” the senior officer of the Council Guards shouted at the crowd. “You are ordered to return to your personal pods immediately.”
The citizens closest to the Guards looked startled by the sudden command, apparently they hadn’t noticed the Guards entering the cafeteria, but none of them moved toward the exit.
When the mass of people showed no signs of dissipating, the officer raised his right hand in a fist, and more than a dozen teams of Council Guards swarmed the room, far exceeding the number of civilians.
“Lay on the floor and put your hands on your head!” the Guards yelled as they shoved people down to the ground.
Crystal’s hand tensed at her side where she kept her laser gun when in her field uniform, but as a Food Preparation Specialist, she was unarmed. She threw a quick glance at Fisher. “What the hellitude?”
Fisher’s stance showed he was ready to jump into the action, but whose side would he take?
She searched his face for a clue, but before she could come to a conclusion, voices from the crowd screamed in pain and the distinct odor of burning flesh reached her nose.
“Holy shiitake,” she cursed. “They’re firing on unarmed civilians.” Crystal’s stomach heaved as she watched Doctor Zeke take a laser shot to the chest and stumble backwards over a chair to lay unmoving on the floor.
The Guards tightened their circle around the crowd, shoving tables and chairs out of the way as they forced the people to lie on top of each other on the ground. The men and women cried out in pain and fear, unaccustomed to any sort of violence on Profortuna.
Fisher turned toward the door leading from the kitchen to the cafeteria.
“Are you going out there?” she asked with disbelief. He was as unarmed as she was.
He glanced back at her. “Are you really going to stand here and do nothing?”
“You willing to choose sides?”
“The Guard is attacking helpless civilians. Whose side do you think I’m going to take?” he asked, disgust thick in his tone.
“There’s nothing you or I can do. There are only two of us versus more than sixty Guards.” Crystal’s gut twisted as she watched men and women hauled to their feet and dragged from the cafeteria. Doctor Brentan had lost his glasses, and he blinked rapidly as if to bring the world into focus.
Within a surprisingly short amount of time, the cafeteria was being cleared of protestors. “What will the Council do with them? They wouldn’t really sentence them all to death, would they?” Crystal swallowed hard to keep her lunch in her stomach.
“If they want to send a message and stop the protests, they will.”
A familiar head of red hair in the crowd caught Crystal’s attention. “Oh, hellitude, no! Bella’s in the middle of that.” She rushed through the cafeteria door without thinking through the consequences.
“Shiitake,” Fisher cursed at her side. “I’ll get her out.”
“I can do it.” Crystal elbowed ahead of him.
He grabbed her upper arms and spun her to face him. “I’m taller and wider. I’ll get her. Stay out of the way of the Guards’ laser guns.” His face was deadly serious as he glared down at her.
She hated to back down, but he was right. He would have a better chance of getting Bella out safely because he could find an escape route easier by looking over the heads of everyone.
Feeling inadequate, she stood along the outer wall of the cafeteria, hopefully outside the notice of the Guards. She watched Fisher blend into the crowd as he arrowed in on Bella, who was trying to help an injured man get to his feet.
Fisher appeared to exchange some urgent words with Bella. From the shaking of her head, she didn’t seem willing to follow Fisher out of the melee.
Come on, Bella, Crystal pleaded silently. Walk away so you can fight another day.
Fisher must have run out of patience because he wrapped his arms around Bella’s waist and forcibly removed her from the center of the conflict. Bella got one good elbow thrust in Fisher’s gut before he contained her in an arm lock and hustled her out of the chaos. As they neared the edge of the circle, they caught the attention of a nearby Guard.
Crystal shouted a warning, and Fisher put his body between the laser gun and Bella. He stumbled as the blast hit him in the thigh, but he shoved Bella at Crystal while maintaining his upright stance.
Crystal grabbed her friend and shoved her into the kitchen. “Take the back door, and get out of here,” she urged Bella.
Bella glanced back over the service counter at Fisher, who was being swarmed by Guards. “What about you and Fisher?”
Crystal took an assessing look and made a quick decision that surprisingly hurt more than she could have imagined. “We can’t save him. Not by ourselves.” She hurried into the kitchen after Bella, resisting the internal personal impulse screaming at her to stay and fight for Fisher.
Banking the outrage at the injustice she’d just witnessed, the soldier in her began planning a strategy to make things right.
Bella grabbed Crystal’s hand and pulled with an unexpected amount of strength. “Come with me. I know who can help him, but we have to hurry.”
Crystal looked behind her through the service opening one last time, grateful the Guards didn’t seem very concerned about two women who’d left the scene while they were engaged in subduing Fisher.
Stars, that man had a lot of fight in him, but it wasn’t doing him any good. He was going to end up a bloody mess before they sentenced him to death.
Bella tugged Crystal into the hall, and they sprinted through the corridors of sector one. Crystal’s military training rebelled at abandoning her fellow soldier, but she had to trust Bella’s contacts could do more to rescue Fisher than Crystal could alone.
Suddenly, she stopped running and bent over, dry-heaving.
“Crystal?” Bella rushed back to her. “Are you injured?”
“No,” she gasped between heaves. “I’ve been nauseous lately. Too much job stress.” She tried to make a joke of it, but she didn’t feel anywhere close to laughing.
“We can’t stay here,” Bella pressed. “The Guards may still decide to come after us.”
Crystal stood upright; dizziness spun her brain cells. She grabbed for the wall, but Bella stepped in and wrapped an arm around Crystal.
“Come on. We have to go,” Bella urged. “The Council will enjoy making an example out of a member of the military. Fisher doesn’t have much time.”
Crystal choked back the nausea and accepted Bella’s assistance of a steady arm. Together, they rushed through mostly deserted hallways. Then, finally, after bolting through nearly the entire length of the sec
tor, they ended their nightmarish race at the door to a personal pod.
“Who lives here?”
“My mates and I,” Bella said.
“Will they be able to help Fisher?”
“They might be able to get him free, but I can’t promise. If they do get him out, we’ll have to find somewhere out of the way to keep him off of the Council’s radar for a while. Maybe even get him on a flight headed back to Fourth Quadrant.”
“Fisher won’t run away from this fight now that it’s been made personal for him.” He didn’t think Crystal really knew him, but her instincts told her differently. She’d seen how he’d reacted to the Council Guards’ abuse of the people. “I know someone who can help us while he recovers.”
They entered Bella’s pod to find two large black military officers in the first room, apparently in the middle of a heated debate.
“Thank the stars,” exclaimed the younger one, a First Lieutenant according to the silver bar insignia on his collar. “We thought you’d gotten caught up in the raid in the cafeteria.” He swept Bella off the floor into an all-encompassing embrace.
“Wex, put me down,” Bella ordered. “I need you and Dete to help my friend. Where’s Novi?”
“Checking the informational pipeline,” Major Dete answered, casting a questioning glance at Crystal’s military uniform.
Obviously, “informational pipeline” was code for something they weren’t willing to discuss in front of her. From the looks of this situation, Crystal figured Bella’s mates were pretty deeply involved with the opposition. But were they working undercover for the Council or truly supporters of the Pro-Freedom Movement?
At this point, Crystal wasn’t even sure anymore where she stood on the issue. After the horrendous use of force by the Guards, she could no longer support the Council, but her military blood ran deep. How could she turn her back on her family heritage?
She looked to Bella’s mates. How did they manage to reconcile their military backgrounds with their involvement with the OAS if they were genuine proponents?
Crystals Three Chosen Mates Page 5