by H. E. Trent
A rivulet of blood trickled down from his forehead and his probably shattered nose hung toward the five o’clock angle rather than six.
She shrugged. “He can call that boo-boo a souvenir.”
She got to work yanking off the communication device on his wrist and checking to make sure he hadn’t initiated an open connection. She’d learned the hard way that those crooks kept the lines open during their half-cocked missions so they could communicate to each other that they’d hit all four posts and that the land was secured…or let each other know they’d been spotted. Obviously, she didn’t want that.
Whistling, she popped out the tiny battery pack of the device, slid the disc into one pocket, and put the COM into another. Her brother Owen could pick apart the components during his oh-so-copious free time, salvage the parts for one of his tech-y, mad scientist experiments, and perhaps even find out something about the guy who’d been wearing it.
If the Terrans hadn’t nearly obliterated the communications grid on Jekh upon their arrival, she might have tried to send a message through her own wrist COM to someone back at the main house. For centuries, every farm in the area had been able to freely access basic wireless voice and video messaging services. With all the holes in the grid, they had to wait until the planet rotated just so, or they’d have to build high-power extender towers on their own properties to enhance their coverage. Owen had built one for the farm. Unfortunately, they’d overloaded a router two days prior and could neither pass messages to each other or to anyone outside of the farm, either.
She hopped over the wooden fence with all the ease of a former juvenile delinquent, snatched Court’s land claim sign out of the bloody guy’s hand, and tacked the paper back up using her staff as a hammer.
“You need better signs, Sissy,” she muttered.
Court’s signs were flimsy, though waterproof, paper that needed frequent replacing. Erin understood why Court and her men had gone the cheap route with them. They needed so many. There was no land or tax office way out in the boonies north of Little Gitano. There’d been plenty of land for the Jekhans living on the planet before Terrans re-discovered it for them. They hadn’t needed bureaucracy. They’d had common sense of the “We were here first, so this is ours, understood?” sort.
Erin pulled another loose nail from the post, pounded it into the bottom of the sign, and then thought to read the thing.
The land inside this fence has been claimed by C. McGarry, Boston, U.S., Earth.
Trespassers will be shot on sight. Leave inquiries at meet-shop, Little Gitano.
Courtney had only claimed the land on paper. The farm had belonged to her lover Trigrian’s family for too many generations to count. She vociferously, and regularly, stated that she preferred that the name on the posts be his, but a Jekhan name on a post would be little more than an invitation to violence.
“There are no Jekhans here, just ghosts,” Courtney had muttered as she’d signed and dated the verification stickers on the newest stack of signs.
Erin had fluffed her sister’s curly ponytail and told her, “The planet Jekh isn’t the passive utopia it used to be.”
“Yeah. It’s like the Wild West if the Wild West had been populated half by a new breed of human good ol’ boys who obviously hadn’t had enough toys growing up.”
Court had sounded cynical, but Erin knew she was right.
The other part of the population was only half human. Jekhans were a genetic experiment of a race called the Tyneali, and had been settling the far-flung planet for millennia. Every now and then, the Tyneali had needed to add new stock to the gene pool to ensure robustness, but they hadn’t done that in a thousand years. The last large group they’d taken had been the population later called “Romani” on Earth. The Jekhan genotype and language had residual components of a people the Jekhans knew very little about.
But then again, no one did. The Romani were all but extinct on Earth, having more or less integrated into other groups. They’d never established a place for themselves, instead leaving a trail of their culture from Southeast Asia all the way to Europe.
Erin rolled up the bogus sign the guy had been about to post. While she was crouching, she yanked his gun out of his holster. She whistled low in appreciation of the mother-in-pearl inlays on the handle. “That’ll trade for something nice. Momma needs a new pair of shoes.”
She gave his head a little thump with the side of her boot and used her wrist COM’s backlight to read his sign.
Property of Dean Carter. Trespassers will be shot.
“You could at least be a little creative.” Erin tucked the sign inside her jacket, strapped her staff to her back, and then braced herself to heave the sloppy jackass beneath the fence gap.
The initial roll was always the hardest part. If she were lucky, once she got him inside and started yanking him toward the hovering deathtrap Trigrian called a truck, adrenaline would kick in. She didn’t have much size to draw on, but she had anger, and she’d learned early on not to be afraid to use whatever weapons she had. McGarrys couldn’t afford to be hesitant.
She dug in her heels, gave the trespasser a hard shove, and then more until he cleared the slats. Panting, she scaled the fence once again, hopped down, and then grabbed his hands.
Looking toward the clearing, she thought she saw movement. Heart pounding, she watched the shadows entwine and then withdraw, limbs flailing, weapons drawn.
Two bodies in opposition to Headron’s one.
“Fuck,” she spat.
Her shoulders were burning and calves screaming by the time she got her guy to the truck, but she dug deep, found one more tablespoon of strength, and heaved him up to his feet…just long enough to let him fall backward into the truck bed, where he hit his head again.
“If anything happens to him, I will personally ensure that your bodies go into Trigrian’s next compost heap.”
She pulled up the gate, and then took off running toward Headron.
The two trespassers were circling around Headron as if to pen him in, and the Jekhan male stood, tall and impeccably calm as always, fingering the edge of his preferred weapon. He always complained the Glock Court had entrusted him with was too loud. Jekhans hated loud things.
The V-shaped weapon, akin to a boomerang, should have immediately given away his Jekhan origin even if his unusual height didn’t, but the would-be land thieves had never been all that observant. Both Erin and Headron had vested interests in keeping their appearances concealed, though for entirely different reasons.
Headron kept turning to prevent both combatants from getting behind him. They were circling, so Erin did, too, until she caught the gaze of one of them.
In an instant, he gave up his pursuit of Headron in favor of Erin, and reflexes moved Erin to raise her staff. No one used staffs anymore—she’d been one of the few in her martial arts classes back on Earth to want to practice with weapons—so he likely didn’t know what the wooden thing being spun in front of him was until it got too close to his face.
She whacked his nose, just because she was pissed at them double-teaming her dear friend, then she smacked his rifle out of his hands. When the slow-thinking dolt bent to pick up the gun, she thrashed the back of his head until he fell.
“For fuck’s sake,” she muttered under her breath as he hit the ground, and then she heard another man fall, too.
She didn’t look up to see if the body was Headron’s. She always worried about him, but she never had to. He was a fighter, and he wanted to live.
Probably not as much as she wanted him to, though.
With her adrenaline crashing and hands shaking, she bent to pick up the rifle. “Why do you insist on playing with them?” she asked. She’d tried to sound cross, but didn’t have the heart. Being upset with Headron was always so difficult.
“As your sister would ask in that florid way of hers,” Headron said in his Jekhani-accented slur, “what good is a fight if the people you beat aren’t scared enough to w
et their pants at the thought of returning?”
Inspecting the butt of the gun, she cringed. Her staff had left a dent.
Maybe Owen can fix it.
Her brother would probably give her one of those long-suffering McGarry stares like he always did, but he’d do the work because with the trade credits, he could buy beer, and there were few things Owen McGarry the Third liked more on such an alcohol-dry planet than Gitanan beer.
“Quit taunting them, Headron. One of these days, you’re gonna get that pretty face of yours bashed in, and then what are you gonna do?”
He chuckled and hooked his throwing stick into a loop on his waistband. “Perhaps you’ll take pity on me and take me as your disfigured second lover.”
“Yeah, if I took you, pity wouldn’t come into play,” she muttered. Not that she’d been taking full advantage of Headron’s repeated offers for them to be “friends with benefits,” but she’d learned pretty early on in their acquaintance that the mild-mannered baker had a typically Jekhan dick.
Which was to say it was huge.
She’d woken up in his not-entirely-chaste cuddles too many mornings to not know just how huge. She might have abstained from having sex since arriving on Jekh, but Erin was no innocent. Like many red-blooded women, she had a penchant for pretty men with good manners and big cocks, and the farm had no shortage of them.
“I wish you would take me,” he said.
“Ugh, don’t start that. We’ve talked about this.” Nightly. So many times, she’d been close to giving in—letting him have his way. Letting him have her.
She was only on Jekh because of Courtney, and Erin was following the rule of thumb of every national park back on Earth: “Look, but don’t take.” He wasn’t hers to touch.
“Fine. Fine.” He heaved his fallen trespasser up to his shoulder and started toward the truck.
“Just wait here,” she said. “I’ll drive the truck over. No need to exert all that effort. See if by some miracle you can get a COM signal over to the compound. Owen was trying to get a bootleg patchwork system going earlier.” She swatted her hood back from her face and started running. Headron already knew she was a girl, so there was no reason to hide her nature any longer.
There weren’t many women on the planet, and Erin would have been something of a commodity to those intruders—maybe even more valuable than the land they were fighting for. Terran settlers would want her for a broodmare, whereas Jekhan men only wanted her because her presence made their weird hybrid hormones happy.
She blew a raspberry as she hopped into the truck cab. “Gone are the days when men want you just because you’re fun, McGarry.”
CRUX is available now.
COPYRIGHT AND CREDITS
ERSTWHILE
Copyright © 2016 Holley Trent
Excerpt CRUX © 2016 Holley Trent
Copy edits by Tasha Harrison/The Dirty Editor
Proofread by Cassie Hess-Dean
Cover art by Clarissa Yeo of Yocla Designs
All rights reserved. Reproduction of any part of this book in any format, except for passages quoted under fair use for reviewing purposes, is allowed only with prior consent of the author.
Erstwhile is a work of fiction. Names, places, entities, and scenarios in this book are products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.