by H. E. Trent
He didn’t say anything for a long while. He shifted his weight in the doorway and folded his arms over his broad chest. He sucked in some air and pushed a hand through his hair. “Your shoes are by the bed.”
She found them there and slid her feet in while Owen piled some objects into a satchel.
The puppy thrashed his tail against her ankles.
She scooped him up and rubbed his head with her chin.
He needed a name still, but she wasn’t ready to commit just yet. He deserved to have a name that was just right and not an afterthought like her name had been. Her name was little more than a grunt in Tyneali.
She moved to the door, muttering about their disregard of what she was called.
Owen held the cane out to her. “What are you talking to yourself about?”
“My name. Mean nothing.”
“Literally means nothing?”
“No. It…just sound.”
“Oh.” He moved the crate from the door and gestured toward outside.
She took a tentative step over the threshold and looked one way, then the other, than up.
No frightening red flashes. No aliens looming over her, besides Owen.
He nudged her forward and closed the door. “It may just be a sound,” he said.
“Hmm?” She set the end of the cane against the ground, tentatively, and took a few steps to adjust her gait.
“Your name.” When she caught up, he picked up his pace. “You say your name is just a sound, but at least it’s a pretty one.”
She didn’t believe him. “You think pretty?” She didn’t know how anyone could.
“To my human ears, yeah, but I don’t know your language.”
“Don’t learn, then. Think pretty.”
He laughed. Actually laughed, and she loved that sound. He wasn’t a robot. He was a man, and he thought she was pretty and that her name was, too.
“Okay,” he said. “If you insist.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Owen had been in the farm’s detached office slouched over the collection of computers and tables for the better part of three hours and didn’t realize how much time had passed until Court slid a lunch plate under his nose.
“Shit. Thanks.” He pushed himself upright and stretched his back.
Salehi and the Cipriani brothers had cleared a space at the spare table in the back of the room and, judging by the amount of free space left on their plates, they’d been eating for a while.
As had Ais.
She was seated in the corner near Owen with the puppy playing nearby, a plate beside her, and a bowl of seeds to sort on her lap. Trigrian must have brought them at some point, and Owen had been so focused on lines of coded text that he hadn’t noticed.
“Damn,” he said.
“Dork,” Court muttered, then turned toward the corner. “Ais, you want to go back to the house with me? No one’s there right now except the ladies, and only a few, at that, since Erin and Amy are in Little Gitano.”
“She’s fine,” Owen said.
“She can talk. Can’t you talk, Ais?”
“Yes,” Ais said. “Can talk.”
“You wanna go watch a movie or something? That’s bound to be a lot more fun than listening to these four communicating in grunts for hours on end.”
“Ah, but even the grunts have grammar and syntax,” Salehi said.
Court rolled her eyes. “Don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining. So, how’s the work going out here? Do you think you’ll be able to unlock the documents?”
Salehi tossed the last remnant of his sandwich into his mouth and knocked the crumbs off his hands. “I’m certain we will. We’re helping the computer make educated guesses about the translations, and we’ve already gotten about five percent translated.”
“That’s great!”
Owen emitted one of those supposedly articulate grunts.
“What’s that for?” Court asked.
“The five percent isn’t contiguous.”
“Damn.”
“But,” Luke said, “it’s enough to see that I was right, and that the documents do refer to specific locations that were in use and are currently in use.”
“The folks in the Jekhan Alliance would find that information incredibly useful. They’re—”
Court didn’t get to speak the rest of her statement because the computer set up to monitor incoming COM messages began to beep.
Owen hurried over and turned on the screen.
He didn’t recognize the caller code, but the structure was familiar, so he accepted the transmission.
Lillian Devin’s visage appeared in the monitoring screen.
“Figured it was you.” Owen turned on the 3D projector and stepped away from the desk.
Lillian then appeared to be sitting behind it with her hands folded atop the surface. As always, her gray bob was brushed smooth, her lips tastefully shaded mauve, and the curtains behind her were drawn. “I hope you’re all well,” she said. She reached forward, likely to tap her controls, and suddenly the camera mounted in the office ceiling swiveled. She was probably trying to see who else was in the room.
“Owen. Courtney. Hello, Edgar.”
“How are things in Buinet, Lil?” Salehi asked.
“I’ll tell you what’s happening in Buinet, and you can decide for yourself. Who’s that with you?”
“Ais is over in the corner,” Courtney pointed.
Lil panned over, expression blank as she worked the controls. “Hello, dear.”
Ais waved mutely.
“Can you see me?”
“No. You fade.”
“Ah. You’ll likely not enjoy what I have to say, so maybe it’s for the best that you can’t see my face. Who else is with you, Courtney?”
“Please meet the Cipriani brothers. Luke’s the one in the BU sweatshirt. Marco’s got the bandana.”
“Are they from Little Gitano?”
“No,” Court said blithely, her white teeth flashing in a too-wide smile. “They’re a couple of hooligans who jacked some US government property and took it on a joyride to Jekh. But don’t worry.” She put up her hands in a placating gesture to the brothers, who’d both stood as though the seats of their chairs had been on fire. “They’re the good kind of hooligans.”
Lil pushed up a skeptical eyebrow. “Like McGarrys?”
“Worse than McGarrys,” Owen muttered.
“Oh, well I may have some use for them, then.”
The brothers wore equally confused expressions.
Salehi patted them both on the shoulders. “You can trust Lil. Mr. McGarry does.”
“Speaking of Granddad,” Court asked Lillian, “Where is he? Is he all right? We haven’t seen his commercials in a few days. My grandmother keeps pinging us and I hate ignoring the calls, but I didn’t know what to tell her.”
“Oh, he’s fine. He and Escobar have been doing a wonderful job rallying the troops. We’ve got Zone Two completely locked down now, as are One and Three. Naturally, I fled at the first sign of danger.” She made air quotes when saying the word “fled.”
Sometimes, she liked to have people believe she was out of town so she could see who misbehaved. Though she often referred to herself as a “lapsed Pollyanna,” she’d settled into the role of the powerful skeptical well enough.
“How many Jekhans have you rounded up to help?” Owen asked.
Lil narrowed her eyes and clucked her tongue. “We vetted twenty-eight men last night, which brings us to a grand total of I-have-no-idea. I’m short on admin help. Had Brenna still been in town, I might have called on her to get me organized.”
Court snorted. “Where’d those twenty-eight come from?”
“Some came up from The Barrens once word about the rioting started to spread, and people like Headron and Herris were hitting all the obvious places to find their family members. They spread the word as they went. A few never left Buinet after the jail emptied and had been in hiding. The Alliance s
ent me the others from various places. These men are all quite invested in our success for different reasons, and they’ve been surprisingly wonderful to work with.” She shrugged. “Maybe they just needed a reason to get angry.”
“So, what’s your news?” Owen asked. While what Lillian had to say about the conditions in Jekh was obviously important, he was impatient and wanted sleep. She was saying far too many words. “You hinted that we weren’t going to like it.”
“No, I said that Ais might not like what I have to say, but I have a great deal of news, actually. First, please tell Esteben that I’ve been in touch with some of his hidden contacts on the western continent. I needed several days to get them to trust me, but I suppose they did their own vetting and finally contacted me back. They believe they can help speed up the repairs of Jekh’s satellite grid, but they’d like to do the work on their own and without oversight from any Terrans.” She cringed. “I can certainly understand their hesitance. I’d like to ask Esteben to continue to be our ambassador in that regard.”
“He just got back from orbiting with some of your mechanics and a few of his old contacts. He just went into town with Erin, but I’ll tell him to get in touch with you as soon as he gets back.”
“I fear he won’t be so eager to do the work once he learns the amount of travel involved, some would put him into orbit for several weeks at a time.”
Court cringed. “He’s barely adjusting to the trips as it is. He’s not going to want to leave Erin any more than he has to.”
“I thought Esteben was more practical than that?”
“Well, he is, usually, but since he knocked up my sister, I think he’s a little less interested in outer space shenanigans than he might have been a few months ago.”
Lil’s eyes went wide, and Owen was pretty sure his were bulging as well.
“What?” Court asked him. “Oh. That’s right. You weren’t at the house this morning when the doctor came by. Apparently, she’s known for a while and just didn’t want us to get freaked.”
Luke whistled low. “Two McGarry women pregnant at the same time. Better watch out.”
“Keep making comments like that and I’ll make you remember why you should watch out.”
“Erin’s pregnant.” Owen had to say the words because he was having such a hard time grasping the announcement. Both of his little sisters were pregnant.
Court nodded sagely. “When she gives birth, we’ll be evenly matched two and two.”
“What?”
Court held up two fingers on each hand to demonstrate the math. “My two. Her two.”
“Two?”
“Uh-huh. You’re supposed to be the genius. Catch up. She’s just knocking out her first two in one pregnancy. She’s always been an overachiever that way.”
Twins. No fucking way.
“When’s she due?” Lil asked eagerly. “We’ll try to get Esteben back before then.”
Twins.
Owen put a hand over his suddenly unsettled stomach. He hadn’t even had a bite of his lunch, so what he was threatening to hurl up couldn’t have been more than bile.
“Doc estimates six months,” Court said, “but I went a little early with Kerry, and I don’t imagine Erin will gestate much differently given her kids’ll have about the same mix of human and Tyneali DNA.”
Twins.
“They…okay?” Ais asked from the corner.
“Oh, sure. They’re fine, honey. Don’t worry.”
“Don’t twin. Never hear. Uh…” She looked to Salehi and spouted off a stream of words in must have been Tyneali.
“Ah,” he said. “She’s never heard of any Tynealis twinning, and doesn’t think Jekhans are particularly predisposed to multiple births, either.”
“Something for the doc to research,” Court said, “but I think Erin and the babies will be fine. We don’t know if they’re identical or fraternal yet or even what the sexes are. Erin doesn’t want to find out.”
Not boys, please.
Owen didn’t think he’d be able to bear looking at them—less so if they were born blond like Esteben. They’d be too much like two other blond boys, one of which didn’t thrive.
Not again, please.
He would never be able to stop grieving, and there was no way in hell that was healthy.
“I’ll have Esteben get in touch,” Court said, oblivious to Owen’s distress.
Everyone seemed to be.
“What else ya got?” Court asked.
“All right, this is the part I thought Ais wouldn’t like. There’s another young woman like Ais who was found on a nearly obliterated station a parsec from here. Before I could get a plan coordinated to have someone from the Alliance fitted with a ship and a small crew to go fetch her, she got picked up by one of those damned pirates.”
“How’d they know about her?” Salehi asked.
“Because,” Lil said through clenched teeth, “she was taken by some of the members of the same crew that took Ais from her station.”
Fear transformed quickly into anger at the insinuation, and Owen snapped his gaze toward Lil’s holographic image. He’d never seen her wearing such a scowl before. The woman was livid.
“I don’t really want to ask, but I have to,” Courtney said softly. “Reg’s crew?”
Lil nodded. “I suppose they knew if there was one like Ais, there had to be more, and they went out looking immediately after they picked up Ais, probably. Due to the distance, intel about that abduction came at a substantial delay, and I’m brokenhearted that we let her slip through our fingers.”
“You can’t be everywhere,” Salehi said.
“I know, but logic doesn’t always make the worry go away.” She tried to put on a grin but the corners of her mouth twitched. “The good news is that Reg is in custody, as is most of his former crew, so there won’t be any further kidnappings…at least, not by them.”
“What’s the bad news?” Owen asked tiredly. All of them, save the Ciprianis, knew not to ask her about their relationship—about who she was to Reg. Some answers weren’t worth the emotional harm the questions caused to the person who had to give them. Lillian had been kind to them, and they tried to do the same for her.
“Well. The bad news is that months ago, someone in Reg’s crew—possibly Reg himself—widely leaked the news of the existence of these women. Apparently, there are dozens of them in Tyneali labs all over the system.”
Ais’s bowl hit the floor and seeds scattered.
Reflexively, he bent and started plucking them up. She was petrified, looking toward Lillian’s image, her mouth slightly parted and pupils wide.
“Don’t panic yet,” he said in an undertone he was certain only she could hear.
She blinked a few times, and swallowed.
“We’re not going to let anyone take you unless you want to be taken. You know that.”
“Don’t want go.”
“Okay. So stop worrying.”
Her eyes went rounder. Wetter.
He wanted to grab her by the cheeks and hold her face in his hands until she looked at him with the same conviction she’d had earlier when he’d been trying to fix his tea.
Fortunately, she nodded before he could give serious thought to doing so, and lowered herself to the floor. When she was tossing seeds back into the bowl, Lillian spoke again. “Are you all right, sweetheart?”
“Fine,” Ais said.
“Okay.” Lillian twined her fingers atop her desk and pulled in a breath. “Dozens of Terran men, the purported fathers, sprang into action to try to squash the news. Many of them already knew about their hybrid offspring and had their heads in the sand about the ramifications. So many of those colony financiers came forward trying to make sure that child wasn’t one of theirs, which I found quite curious because my assumption was that they knew about the girls. Anyhow, news is out that these women are around, and the wives of some of those men are none too pleased that their dear husbands were distributing genetic material
behind their backs.”
“And to the Tyneali, at that.” Owen rubbed his chin.
Lillian turned her hands over. “Ais’s father is foaming at the mouth. He knows that Reg had her at some point, and that whoever had Reg’s ship probably has her.”
“What the fuck does he want with her?”
“That, I can’t speculate on. All I know is that these men aren’t necessarily decent men. If they were, they wouldn’t have been financing the mess on Jekh. Do your best to keep Ais undercover if you can. No trips into Little Gitano, and make sure any strangers who visit the farm don’t have an opportunity to see her—at least not until we work this mess out.”
Ais’s grip tightened around the shaft of her cane, and she blinked rapidly towards Lil’s holographic form.
Too slowly, he identified the stricken look on her face as fear, but Courtney must have seen it, and her reflexes were working fine.
She slid down the wall next to Ais and pulled her into her arms. “We’re not going to let anyone hurt you, okay?”
Ais closed her eyes, and nodded.
Owen watched, impotently clenching his hands into fists at his sides. She hadn’t believed him so quickly when he’d said the same thing. Obviously, she didn’t trust him. After the way he’d treated her, she probably had no good reason to.
Salehi approached the desk that held the COM system components and tapped some commands into the keyboard. “I’m going to send you some documents we’ve partially broken the code on. I have no doubt we’ll have worked out the code within the next couple of days, but I worry that if the colony investors are in a fervor, they may get to these sites before we can get anyone there to investigate. If the US Government knew about these sites, there’s a good chance some of the lobbyists knew about them, too. I don’t want them burying evidence before we can get to it.”
“Agreed,” Lillian said. “I’ll see who I can find and get them to work immediately. Be on the lookout for incoming messages from me.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Lillian signed off.
Luke approached the table, whistling low. “So now we’re racing a clock but we don’t know how long the countdown is or if we’ll have the right resources to do anything once we’re done.”