by H. E. Trent
The same McGarry?
Owen McGarry. The man from Earth who wanted to help.
He was why Court was there.
No wonder she’d been so easy to trust. His gut knew how important she was even when his brain didn’t know for sure.
Trouble likely followed his beautiful mate wherever she went.
And Murk couldn’t fight for her or even talk at the moment. That was a problem.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Several days later, Court cast a speculative look at Amy’s personal flying craft and shook her head. “Nuh-uh. Not getting into that.”
Amy blew some dust off the door handle on her side and coughed delicately, waving the particles away from her face. “Oh, come on, this baby is air-worthy. I promise! Once I get it out of the garage and into the sun, you won’t notice how neglected it’s been.”
Court dropped her chin to her chest and gave Amy a speculative look. “So you admit your flyer isn’t in showroom condition.”
Amy blew some more dust off the silver paint, and chuckled haltingly. “Uh. It’s fine. I swear on a stack of Jekhan pastries.”
Court turned her attention back to the low vehicle yet again, and studied the construction. The flyer was sleek and light. The body couldn’t have weighed more than an upright piano. The dust-coated metal was so thin that she didn’t think the vehicle would survive a crash from six feet up, much less at flying altitude. The flyer, currently parked on the floor of Amy’s rented garage stall in Zone Two, was no taller than Court’s very low tits, and its patchy paint job didn’t do much to instill confidence, either.
“Amy, are you sure this isn’t a toy?”
Amy held up four fingers. “This thing can hold four full-grown men plus six medium-sized bags.”
“In theory, maybe.” Its teardrop-shaped body looked as though four people could fit inside—one in the pilot seat and three in the wider back—but the travel wouldn’t be comfortable. “Where did you even get this thing?”
If Amy had been born with feathers, she would have been fluffing them at the moment. Instead, she preened—patting her glossy red hair bun smooth—and grinned at Court. “Traded for it.”
“That’s not a Terran design.”
“Nope.”
“You traded with a Jekhan?”
“Nope. Traded with a Terran who didn’t know how to start it.”
“And you do?”
Amy’s grin broadened. “Yep. Remember, I’ve got Jekhan friends.”
She pulled open a drawer in the red metal toolbox at the back of the stall and grabbed a couple of yellow cloths. She tossed one to Court along with a spray bottle.
Court read the label. Solar panel cleanser.
“You get your side, I’ll get mine,” Amy said cheerily. “This thing hasn’t been charged in a year or more, so the batteries are probably completely depleted. I’m going to connect the plug to the electric port while we’re cleaning so I have enough power to get the flyer out of the garage.”
Court started spraying the sooty gold stripes Amy indicated. “What did you have to trade to get it? Working or not, the metal is probably valuable just for the scraps.”
“Cost me all the cargo space assigned to me in one of my shuttle runs. The guy needed to have some tools transported from Earth and had already exceeded his shipment allotment for the year.”
“Nice.”
“Yeah. I make more money renting out my cargo space than I do being a shuttle attendant.” Amy sighed, and rubbed harder at a particularly resistant spot of dirt on a solar panel. “So, how was your week? A couple of the busybodies in Zone Seven heard you got assigned a beat in Six.”
Court grunted. Sprayed. Scrubbed. “I did. Nothing much goes on there, and I would know, because I live there. I did see a couple of Jekhans doing sewer work, though. They seemed surprised to see me.”
“You talked to them?”
“No. I always assume they don’t want to be seen talking to me.”
“They know who you are, I bet.”
“Word gets around that fast?”
Amy shrugged. “The Terran population on Buinet is still low enough that some people are exceptionally memorable. Most only need to say that they saw a female LEO and they’ll know exactly who the person in question is. Oh! I have your shoes by the way.”
“My shoes?”
“Yeah. Forget already? You traded chocolate and kind words to Herris for a pair of shoes.”
“Actually, yes. I did forget.”
“I’ll give them to you later, but don’t worry—the man does damned good work. If he were single, I might be barking up his tree.” Amy moved to the back of the flyer and attacked a panel there. “Speaking of Jekhan men who want to do you favors…”
Court sighed and plopped her hands onto her hips. “Oh, God. Now what?”
“Hey! No one new. Still the same guy. Listen, you should give Headron a chance. The secret lovers scenario wouldn’t be ideal, but I’m certain he would take whatever he could get. He’s practically begging.”
“Because his immune system is out of whack and he needs to regulate his hormones?”
Amy stopped scrubbing—stopped grinning.
She rolled her Bambi gaze up to Court and blinked. “What do you mean?”
Court leaned against the spot she’d cleaned and folded her arms over her chest. “I don’t buy the ignorance routine. You have to know about that. You’ve been here too long and are too deeply networked to not know their issues. By now, someone would have told you.”
“I—”
“Amy. Please.”
Amy put up her hands. “Okay. Yeah. I know about that. I try to help as much as I can, just by hanging out, but there’s only so much I can do. The most-traded item in Zone Seven is Marscadrel, and vials are getting harder and harder to come by. How’d you find out?”
Court sprayed the last panel on her side of the car and wondered if she’d said too much. She could possibly have learned about Jekhan hormonal imbalances as part of her job as a cop, but she didn’t feel comfortable lying about that. She hated lying in general. “Would you believe me if I said I learned about it secondhand while getting some tests done?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so.” Court walked her cloth to the toolbox and set it inside. She passed her hand over the thermos filled with coffee Amy had brought along for their early-morning escapade and talked herself out of having a cup. Coffee would make her want to pee, and according to Amy, where they were going, there probably weren’t going to be many facilities. “Suffice it to say I’ve made friends with a couple of Jekhan men.”
Amy’s quiet footsteps padded behind her, and then she was next to her. “A couple or a couple?”
“A couple. Lovers.”
“So you know about…”
“Yeah.”
Amy scoffed. “Ha! I see. Jekhans may be laid-back, by the by, but they tend to be extremely protective of their females. Doesn’t matter if they’re sisters, friends, or part of their permanent trio. They probably wouldn’t be pleased with you having a mercy fuck with our baker friend.”
“One was more than a little annoyed about Headron giving me fruit.”
“Did he tell you why?”
“Not in clear terms. I thought he was just in a certain kind of mood. He’s cranky on the best of days.”
Yes, Trigrian was cranky, but she thought she was making some headway with him. When he was engaged in something he was passionate about—like poring over seed catalogues—he was like a different man. He smiled and played and she didn’t have to squeeze words out of him he wasn’t willing to give her. Murk said that was the real Trigrian, but Court wasn’t so sure. His hot and cold moods always left her feeling off her keel, and most of the time, he slept alone. She’d asked Murk if she’d done something to offend Trig, and he’d told her to ignore the behavior.
She couldn’t.
“So, which of those things are you?” Amy asked.
�
��Huh?”
“You’re not their sister, obviously, so that makes you friend or lover. Which are you?”
Briefly, Court considered lying again, but figured obfuscating was pointless. Amy had to know the appeal of a Jekhan man on a planet being settled by rough middle-aged men and overgrown, over-privileged little boys.
Court sighed. “Lover.”
Amy’s jaw dropped and eyes went wide. “You minx. That was fast! You find them in Zone Seven?”
Court cringed. “No. They’re…off the grid.”
“Really? That’s interesting. There are lots of those guys around, though. Hard to speculate about them.”
“How do you know there are lots of them?”
“I’m a trader. My business is predicated on knowing things. Are they in good shape?”
Court shrugged. “Better than they were when I found them, I guess.”
“Well, damn. I’ll call off the hounds, I guess, and hope for Headron’s sake, there’s a nice lady for him on the next shuttle run.”
“He shouldn’t hold his breath.”
“Maybe he’ll get lucky and the relo agency will encourage some affirmative action hiring.”
Court thumped her palm against her forehead. “Shit. I keep forgetting to cancel my match. I don’t want to lead that guy on, and there’s no way I can…”
What? Be with him after being with Murk? After wanting Trigrian for a lover as well?
Not just that. She just didn’t want the guy. Maybe he had a perfectly pleasant personality, but would she feel that same instant compatibility she did with Murk? The same unquenchable attraction she had toward Trigrian?
Didn’t seem likely.
Amy nodded sagely. “I’ll tie a string to your wrist so you’ll remember to call first thing Monday morning. If you wait too long, we’ll have to find some gross alien illness to infect you with to screw up all your test results. He won’t want you if you’re not perfect.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
Amy dropped her rag into the box, wiped her hands on her jumpsuit pants, and then tipped her head toward the box of pastries. “Grab that, will you?”
Court picked them up, knowing she would feel very guilty about consuming them because Headron had sent them. But the guilt would last only for a little while. Their mouthwatering deliciousness would absorb all that guilt, though it’d probably come back with a vengeance later in her butt and thighs.
“Um. Speaking of our baker, does he have a…”
“A what?”
“A…boyfriend? A male lover?” Court felt silly even asking, but she couldn’t help being curious. She’d never seen him close enough to anyone else in such a manner that would hint at intimate familiarity.
“No. Not yet,” Amy said. “He’s picky.”
“And yet he wanted me?”
“Honey, every unattached man in Seven wants you. Not only do you smile at every-damn-body, but you’ve got porn star boobs.”
Court looked down at her small C-cups. “They’re not all that spectacular.”
“To a Jekhan man, they are. Now, let’s unplug this thing and get it into the air. We’ve got sights to see and stuff to trade!”
“With whom?”
Amy winked. “You’ll see.”
Oh, boy.
___
Of all the things the police commissioner hated about her job, dealing with numbskulls like Delroy Festus topped them all. He thought he was so slick, putting his fingers in every pot—trying to take what wasn’t his and intimidate his way to money and status.
But, she saw every damn thing he did and she remembered. She wrote them down on paper. Paper might have been burnable and able to get ripped, but it couldn’t get hacked. She kept her little notebook close to her heart. Inside her bra, actually.
She was sick of Festus and all the others like him, but she was just one woman and couldn’t do anything. Not yet, anyway. She had to bide her time.
There were some small acts of sabotage she could do without arousing suspicion, though.
That was why on a Saturday, she was at the station, logged into Festus’s account, and deleting personnel record information for one Courtney McGarry.
“I wish she hadn’t come here,” she muttered as she ran the subroutine that would clean up the login data. If anyone were skillful enough to undo the damage that bit of code was doing, they wouldn’t track the origin back to the commissioner. The change would be on Festus’s log, which would confuse them all enough to drop the inquiry.
She turned off the display, pulled the program module from the input portal, and tucked the card into a little slot in her wrist cuff.
That bracelet was always getting her out of jams.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Trig had to let Courtney in that evening.
He’d installed the deadbolts with no problems, but then forgot they effectively barred access to anyone including the house’s owner.
She stepped across the threshold smelling of dust and smoke and immediately knelt to scratch Jerry behind the ears.
The hour was late—nearly midnight.
Perhaps she doesn’t know.
“Where have you been?” The words came out sharper than he’d intended, but the tone suited his mood. She’d been gone a long time—since before dawn. Murk had started to worry and couldn’t be calmed. He’d finally dozed off on the sofa watching the door. He’d insisted that something had happened to her. Trig had gently reminded him that Courtney was a grown woman and had been going off on her own for over a decade, probably. That hadn’t placated him any, but Trig hadn’t really expected that the logic would.
“Did you let Jerry out?” she asked, ignoring his question.
“A couple of hours ago.”
“Thanks.” She stood, locked the door, and heeled off her boots. She set a rectangular parcel atop the catchall table and started for the kitchen.
Trig followed, turning off the living room lamp as he went. Murk would probably wake in the middle of the night to go looking for her, but Trig wanted to let him rest until then.
She pulled out bread, meat, cheese, and various other sandwich components and set them atop the counter. “Got held up,” she said. “My friend Amy does some trade with folks outside the settlement zones, and there were a couple who insisted we stay and chat for a while. They’re cut off from communications and needed to be caught up.”
“Terrans?”
She scoffed. “No. Actually, not. I wouldn’t go as far as to say they’re hiding in plain sight, but no one would think to look for them where they are. They seem to be getting along well enough, aside from the loneliness.”
“There are others still out there and thriving?” he mused quietly.
“Appears so.”
“Hmm.” Perhaps going home wasn’t such a farfetched idea. Even if the farm wasn’t in any condition for production, it could at least be habitable. The farm could be as safe a place as Courtney’s house in Buinet. Safer, even.
“How far did you go?” he asked.
“As far as the desert’s western barrier. It had started getting dark by then, and Amy didn’t want to rely on her flyer’s energy meter. The meter said she could have kept going, but she didn’t trust it. She hadn’t taken the flyer out in a year and the vehicle hasn’t had any maintenance.”
Amy has a flyer? Odd. Terrans hadn’t been able to figure out how to work them because they couldn’t start them. They required special programming by the owners. “Did you encounter anyone there in the desert? My farm was on a major trade route between the cities on the River Dara and the Sisten Mountain Range.”
Often, his mother would open their home and feed passers-by, many who stopped dwelled in the desert and made their livings extracting and trading valuable minerals from the arid soil there.
She chuckled and spread some sort of white condiment on both of her slices of bread. “Yeah, we did. Flagged us down waving their pulse weapons. For as long as I’ve been an LEO, I’v
e never been afraid of an encounter, but those guys were pretty fearsome, even looking down at them from the air.”
“Did you talk to them?”
“Yeah. Amy gets around, and her reputation always seems to precede her. I don’t know how she does it. She landed us and traded for… Hmm.” She set down her knife and patted her shirt pockets. “Ah.” She pulled out and handed a small metal cylinder to him.
Her turned the vial over in his hand and squinted at the Jekhani-printed label. “Marscadrel?”
“Mm-hmm. The desert clan had a small supply they didn’t need because they were more or less all woman’d up and hormonally stable, I guess. They keep it for trade, but would only give me one.”
“In exchange for what?”
Her hand stilled over the head of lettuce, and it was a quick one, but he caught her flinch.
“What did you give them, Courtney?”
“Nothing I was particularly attached to,” she said after a suspicious pause.
“I don’t believe you.”
“So, you know me well enough to call me a liar, Trigrian?”
He leaned against the counter beside her and folded his arms over his chest. She couldn’t ignore him if he were that close, and couldn’t hide her expressions. “Did you tell them why you needed the drug?”
“Only in vague terms.” She ripped off a lettuce leaf, laid it over one of the bread slices, and reached for her knife again.
He watched her slice off two fat tomato slices and plop them atop her concoction.
“Tell me what you gave them.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Because they don’t just barter out of the goodness of their hearts. They’re profit-minded like any good traders. You had to have given them something they thought was more valuable than a vial of Marscadrel. And this”—he held up the tube—“will maintain an unattached Jekhan man for a year. Single dose.”
She sighed. “Okay, so it’s valuable. Look, I gave them a ring I’d had for a long time, but this was more important. Murk seems better, but, short of getting him to a doctor, there’s no way to be sure.”