Salvo: A Sci-Fi Romance (The Jekh Saga Book 3)

by H. E. Trent

  “What she learn? Please.”

  “Well, she already knew who your father was. Or at least, the guy the genetic material came from.”

  Ais had asked Eileen to look him up in her computer, but Eileen wouldn’t. She’d worried that looking into him would just stress Ais out, especially if he turned out to be a bad person. “What if he has cold eyes? What if he looks mean?” Eileen had asked in that funny accent of hers that the McGarrys said was “Texan.”

  Ais had demurred, because she preferred to believe that the man was decent. He probably wasn’t, though. She hadn’t been on Jekh long, but she’d learned that too many human men who had anything to do with Jekh didn’t have good intentions in mind.

  “Lillian talked to some folks in the Jekhan Alliance to try to get some access to old Jekhan genetic information,” Courtney said. “All that data is badly corrupted now, but she managed to get a scientist who’d been hiding out in The Barrens to come forward. He’d backed up a lot of the medical information from Buinet from before the Terrans came. She found a match.”

  “Yes? What match?”

  “For your mother, sweetie.”

  “Mother? Don’t understand.” Of course, Ais knew she hadn’t magically sprang into being like Venus out of the sea, but the concept of parentage was still so difficult for her to grasp. As Eileen liked to say, Ais hadn’t been conceived so much as manufactured. She was never meant to be typical.

  She wasn’t meant to connect with anyone.

  “You actually have a cousin here. Had this been anywhere but Jekh, I’d say this would be a coincidence, but that seems less likely to be the case when you understand a little something about the parties in play.”

  Courtney was saying too many words, so Ais shook her head. “Cousin? What mean?”

  “Mmm.” Courtney clucked her tongue and stilled her hands in Ais’s hair. “A cousin is a child of your aunt or uncle.”

  “Oh!” Ais gave Courtney the Tyneali word for that, and Courtney mumbled something about the sound being unpronounceable.

  “Anyway,” Courtney said, “that little tidbit blew me the hell away.”

  “Have family?” Ais turned on the bench so she could see Courtney’s face, but Courtney kept her facing forward. She was still rubbing goop into Ais’s hair.

  “Yes, Ais, you have a cousin here on the farm. We just told her, and she’s just as stunned.”

  “Who?”

  “Amy,” Courtney said softly, and Ais saw a glint of white—her teeth as she smiled. “The best Lillian could guess is that Amy’s mother was your aunt. We don’t know what happened to your mother—if she’s alive, or if she even knows she has a child—but Lillian thinks she was probably chosen because if she were like Amy’s mother, she would have been very pale. That’s why this doesn’t seem so coincidental. She would have looked more human. I’ve only seen a handful of Jekhans with the right coloring, whether white or brown or some shade in between, to blend in with Terrans.”

  Not a coincidence.

  Ais was just a breeding experiment, after all, like everyone else on Jekh. The Tyneali had simply been more hands-on with her.

  The sound she made was half laugh and half sob.

  “Oh, sweetie. I’m sorry.” Courtney gave her shoulders a soothing squeeze. “Hey. I understand. Amy said that from what she remembers, her aunt was very pretty, but she didn’t see her much. Amy’s mother was a maid who married well, and I suppose your mother didn’t always feel welcome around the Maurens.”

  “She dead?”

  “There’s no way of knowing. With everything being such a mess, I’m not sure if there’s anyone who could track where she went.”

  “Tyneali know?” Ais had never had a mother, but she wanted a mother like Courtney and Erin’s who called so much over the long-distance COM, and who worried about them so much. She loved her girls. Ais could hear just how much in the way her voice cracked when she talked.

  Courtney was silent until she’d combed the ends of Ais’s hair. She sighed then. “Maybe they do. Headron passed on word last month that some Tyneali had visited the southern continent, so getting in touch with them isn’t as impossible as we thought. The question is, how badly do you want to? They’re hard to trust right now, and we don’t want to give you up.”

  Ais could only nod because the painkiller was fogging her brain and she couldn’t choose the right English words.

  She didn’t want to be given back. She didn’t want to go back to the Tyneali, even if there was a chance they had information about her mother. She wanted to be around people who had art and music and laughter…even if some of those people called her “silly little fool.”

  “The other thing…” Courtney dipped Ais back into the water and rinsed her hair. “Lillian’s gathered some troubling intelligence that your, um…paternal unit, knows you exist. Perhaps he wasn’t consulted about your creation specifically, but he and many others in similar positions are aware that you were created.”

  “Why?”

  “The answer to that question is always the same—I don’t know. The only thing we know for certain is that you would had to have been conceived before the Jekhans landed on Earth for that ill-fated first contact mission.”

  And the rest was history, as Erin might have said. The “Jekhan Scare” began on Earth after the fear of an alien invasion that had never even been planned. The Jekhan convoy hadn’t gone to Earth to attack or even scout. They’d wanted to re-establish contact and perhaps find mates for some of the men. The female birthrate on Jekh was extraordinarily low, which made the theft of so many of their women so much more troublesome.

  “We’ll keep digging for information,” Courtney said. “Me and Erin…we just thought you should know that much. I don’t want you to fret all night. If there’s anything new to learn, Lillian will find out. She’s a bulldog. She’s not going to let the subject drop until she’s put the pieces together and has figured out what we’re really dealing with. The question is, do you want to know more?”

  “About mother? Yes.” Ais didn’t give a damn about the rest. She didn’t care about the Tyneali. She didn’t care about her father, either, whoever he was. Eileen was right. If he was cruel, Ais would prefer not knowing anything about him.

  Courtney raised her up and immediately wrapped a towel around her shoulders. “Let’s get you warm and to bed. Did you get enough to eat?”

  Ais found her footing at the tub ledge and accepted Courtney’s hand.

  Courtney scooped up Ais’s dress and then led her around the room toward the door.

  “I eat.”

  “Good. Fastida is going to bunk with Amy tonight so you can get some sleep.” Courtney chuckled. “I know Fastida talks in her sleep. Sometimes, the stuff that comes out of her mouth is hysterical, but when you’re exhausted and trying to get some REM sleep, you might be more compelled to strangle her than laugh.”

  “Is funny, Fastida.” Ais smiled. The Jekhan woman was unabashedly unfiltered, much to her mother Cet’s chagrin.

  Ais followed Courtney down the hall, watching the other woman’s back as they moved toward the bank of retiring rooms that were on the leg of the house nearest the bathing room. She was so lost in her own thoughts that she didn’t notice that there was someone in the hall until Courtney stopped.

  “God, what?” Courtney snarled.

  Of course, Ais had to look around her to see who’d deserved such derision.

  Blond.

  Owen.

  The Beshni brothers were blond, too, but their hair was longer and they didn’t have beards. Discerning between the three men had become simpler once she’d figured that out.

  Owen held what looked like towels, but she couldn’t tell for sure. Her eyes couldn’t quite focus on the shapes. The color of them wasn’t easily definable, more or less blending into his shirt.

  “The shower at the cottage isn’t working,” he said. “I need to use the tub tonight. I’ll figure out what’s wrong with the plumbing out
there tomorrow.”

  “Help yourself,” Courtney said, “but I could have sworn I told you all not to come looking for a bath for at least two hours.”

  “Perhaps I missed the memo. I was busy pulling thorns out of my favorite work shirt for a while.”

  Ais cringed and moved herself more squarely behind Courtney’s body, not that Courtney was all that substantial a cover. They were about the same height. Courtney just had the bigger personality.

  “What do you want, a cookie with your name on it?” Courtney asked. “A ticker tape parade? Fireworks?” Courtney reached up and gave her brother a pat on the shoulder. “Thank you for being a hero. Feel better now?”

  “I didn’t ask for kudos.”

  “So, what are you asking for? Someone to fix your shirt? Last I checked, there was nothing wrong with your fingers. If you can build a satellite receiver from scratch, you can certainly figure out how to thread a needle.”

  He didn’t say anything, and Ais craved taking a peek to see if she could make out his expression to see if his face looked as aggrieved as he sounded, but she kept very still.

  He started past them, but stopped by Ais and looked down at her.

  She blinked, and her gaze tracked reflexively toward the movement of his hand.

  He picked up a shorter swath of her wet hair, grunted, dropped the hair, and then went about his way.

  Ais watched him retreat, wondering if he’d be so coldly efficient in the tub as he was in everything else he did, or if he’d take his time and soak…and touch, like Ais sometimes did.

  No, he wouldn’t touch. He’s a machine.

  “Ignore him.” Courtney got her moving again. “He’s been a cranky asshole as of late, and Granddad says he’ll probably grow out of the demeanor by the time he’s forty-five or fifty.” Courtney snorted and nudged Ais into her room.

  As if ignoring him were so easy.

  Ais couldn’t ignore things she wanted so badly to figure out.

  Sitting on the edge of her unmade bed, she dried her legs and chewed on the inside of her cheek as Courtney plaited her hair.

  Ignoring him would probably be best for her ever-present anxiety, but she’d need practice—even more since he’d pulled her from the thorns and had slid her to the ground down against the hardness of his body before letting her go.

  He’d let her go. Reg had never let her go once he grabbed on—not until he’d gotten what he’d wanted—nor had any of the men he’d loaned her out to. They gripped her so she wouldn’t flee before they were through, and she’d fought them because she hadn’t wanted them.

  Because they hurt.

  Owen didn’t hold on.

  She didn’t know what that meant.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Owen settled into the tub up to his neck and leaned his head back against the rim.

  Silly little fool.

  Courtney and Erin treated Ais like some kind of doll, heedless of the fact she was the most dangerous person on the farm. They just couldn’t see the risks like he could. He was always better at being objective because he didn’t let people get close anymore. They were going to get hurt and, because they were his sisters, he wouldn’t even feel good about saying, “I told you so.”

  He closed his eyes and stretched his stiff legs out ahead of him. All that tromping through the trees would probably exact its vengeance in the form of joint pain come morning.

  “Need to take something before bed. Maybe Dorro left some of that juice behind.”

  Owen’s wrist COM chirped at the ledge. He picked up his head and brought the device closer to his face, squinting at the screen. “The fuck?”

  He hadn’t expected to see the displayed caller code so far from Earth. “Thing has to be glitching again,” he muttered. He was really going to have to find the time to repair the thing.

  Curious, he gave the band a double tap.

  “McGarry, who’s this?” he asked on the off chance there was actually someone on the other end.

  “You already know,” came the laughing male voice, streaked through and through with the sounds of Owen’s native Boston. “You wouldn’t have answered if you didn’t.”

  Owen sat up straighter and rubbed sweat from the steam out of his eyes.

  This for real?

  “Luke? How the fuck are you calling me on this frequency? You’re too far away.”

  “Nope. Try again,” his friend since basically forever said in the taunting, singsong voice he always deployed when he’d been up to no good.

  “Where are you?”

  “Three guesses.”

  “You’re on Jekh? No way.”

  “Eh. Close enough.”

  “You serious?” The last time Owen had heard from Luke had been just before Owen had stepped onto a long-haul shuttle to chase down Court. The McGarrys and the Ciprianis had grown up in the same neighborhood, but Luke had gone “respectable,” for the most part. He’d gone to college and gotten a legitimate degree, and then had gone into the FBI. At his core, however, Luke was still a snot-nosed kid from the ’hood with a chip on his shoulder who occasionally subverted the system just for shits and giggles. When Owen needed information acquirable through less than legal means, Luke got him what he needed and kept his mouth shut.

  “What the hell are you doing in this part of space?” Owen asked.

  “Oh, you know,” Luke said, “the usual shit. Hey, you remember when we were fourteen and we borrowed that car that some stronzo left unlocked?”

  Laughing, Owen pinched the bridge of his nose. “Ah, yes. The joyride that earned me a hell of a beating. Thank you for that, by the way. I’d never seen my father so fucking mad. That was after we’d been told Granddad was dead and everyone was stressed out.”

  As it turned out, the senior Owen McGarry grandfather wasn’t dead. He’d been in stasis near Jekh, playing dead because people on Earth wanted to kill him for being a “Jekhan sympathizer.” He’d lobbied against the Terran assault on Jekh and the entire family had been branded as traitors. Their reputation hadn’t improved much in the two decades since.

  “Well, you know,” Luke said. “Maybe you chose not to risk that particular variety of fun again, but I happened to get better at boosting cars.”

  “What are you telling me, Luke?” Owen dropped his hand, mood already plummeting. When Luke got a wild hair to get in trouble, he found things to completely upend, and he always had accomplices. “I don’t like the tone you’re using.”

  “That’s because since Michael died, you don’t like fun, do you?”

  Owen gave his bar of soap a hard slap, and it skittered across the surface of the water, coming to a stop in the center of the long tub, then sank. He’d have to go fetch the bar if he had any intention of getting clean at all, but that could wait. Luke had brought up Michael. People knew not to bring up Michael, but Luke didn’t always play by the rules. In fact, the rules didn’t exist for Luke.

  “Look. Mike was my friend as much as you are, and I miss him. I swear I do, but you can’t stop living just because he did. Mike being dead isn’t your fault.”

  Bullshit.

  “I wasn’t there,” Owen shouted.

  “Yeah. Okay. You keep saying that, but what more could you have done? All of you McGarrys knew he didn’t have long, and he left the world on his own terms. You think he wanted his twin sitting there waiting for him to take his curtain call?”

  “He shouldn’t have been alone, you fucking idiot, and I should have known what he was doing.”

  But Owen had had his head up his ass. He’d been distracted by some contract work and had been on a hell of a deadline. Still, he should have known that the usually gregarious and social Michael was withdrawing. The signs were all there.

  Michael had died alone, and the coroner hadn’t retrieved his body until two days later when Courtney had forced her way into his apartment. Michael always called her in the mornings. He hadn’t called. She’d worried.

  “I’m not gonna argue with y
ou about Mike,” Luke said. Owen could imagine him rubbing a hand down his face in that weary way he always did. “Not now. You wanna hash things out later? Fine. We’ll talk about him until we’re both blue in the face. Right now, we’ve got other problems.”

  “Apparently.” Owen forced some air through his parted lips and stood. He really did need to get the soap. “Where are you?” He patted the bottom of the deep tub with his foot in search of the bar.

  “Inside the Jekh system and very near the planet. I’d programmed my COM to put yours on a continuous signal search and to automatically connect as I got closer.”

  “You’re on a shuttle? Last I heard, there weren’t any civilian shuttles heading to or from Jekh.” Owen’s big toe nudged the squishy bar. He dipped beneath the surface of the water quickly and snatched the soap up in time to hear Luke say, “Nah, not a shuttle. There are only three people in this puppy. One’s the relief pilot, who’s been practicing Jekhan swear words on me for the past week, and the other’s some growly dork who’s about to eat the last of our rations.”

  “Fuck you, Luke,” said a man with a very recognizable bass voice. A Cipriani sort of bass voice.

  “Is that…Marco?” Owen asked.

  “Yup,” Luke said cheerily. “Needed someone with even worse morals than I’ve got to tell the right lies to get this puppy off the base, and here we fuckin’ are. Tell me we’re not awesome. Go on and try.”

  Owen massaged his temple with the hand that wasn’t holding soap. “Wait. What puppy? And does your mother know her sons are gallivanting through space?”

  “Eh. Sons and daughter, if you wanna be precise. My relief pilot is Ma’s prezioso, ha ha. Ma’s gonna freak, right?”

  Luke’s laugh hinted that he thought his mother’s imminent cataplexy would be the source of an absolute laugh riot. He’d always been a shitty son.

  Holy hell.

  Owen grabbed a section of his hair and tugged. He wasn’t finding the humor in the situation.