by H. E. Trent
“No.” Ais shook her head. “Stay here. Want…ground.”
They all laughed.
“Yeah, I know that feeling,” Luke said. “If there’s anything in the cottage you need, me and Owen will go get it.”
Owen gave him a pointed look.
“Okay, maybe I’ll go get it.” Luke rocked back on his heels. “You just hang tight.”
“Great.” Court clapped her hands and took the bowl from Erin. “Now that that’s settled, talk to me about the code you jokers broke. I think my brain can handle one more thing.”
“You sure about that?” Luke asked.
Court glowered at him. “Actually, no, but whatever. Tell me anyway.”
“Well, we’ve got coordinates,” Salehi said. “I’m not familiar with the vast majority of the locations, and I don’t even know how the slavers would have found them. Some of them may have already been vacated by now. The report Luke pulled was already a couple of months old.”
“Pretty safe bet, though, that the larger of the compounds wouldn’t be so easy to evacuate, right?” Erin asked.
“Not without a lot of ships, and we have a pretty good idea of how many Terran-owned spacefaring vehicles there are on the planet because the majority belonged to Jekhans first. Most of the ships that could make trips of the length those distances require are all locked down in Buinet right now. Lil’s last note said that Jekhans are controlling all air traffic in and out of the area.”
“Good for them,” Court said. “So, I suppose the wise thing at this point would be to send some scouts out in the fastest ships we have and to try to discreetly take the pulse of these places, and have some bigger, people-moving vessels on standby.”
“That sounds like something Lillian would suggest.” Salehi grinned.
“I’ll take that as a compliment. Man, if only I had the woman’s brain for details, though. I tend to be a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-panties kind of girl, whereas she can looks at the big picture and can predict all the shit that could potentially go wrong.”
“She’s had a lot of practice. You’ll get there one day.”
“Don’t encourage her,” Erin said. “She’s supposed to be getting in less trouble than she did on Earth, not more.”
“Come on,” Court sang sweetly. “Don’t you want to go adventuring?”
“No, in fact, she most certainly doesn’t,” Esteben said, returning to the room. He looked to Ais. “The doctor will bring a scanner when he comes to operate on your other eye. He says he can’t guarantee that the technology he has will be able to get a reading on anything foreign in your body, but if push comes to shove, he’ll try to excise it anyway.”
“Thank you.”
Esteben nodded, gave Erin one more look of warning—which made her grin sheepishly—and then left.
Owen gave Ais a squeeze and waited for her to turn her eye toward him. “I think you’re finally adjusting to being around the Jekhan men. You didn’t try to hide under the table.”
She forced out a breath through her open mouth. “No so bad. Have women to mind them.”
There was a collective snort in the room, but Owen didn’t think Ais was joking. She was an outsider to Jekhan culture and likely conceptualized it differently than the longtime residents did.
Perhaps Jekhan men really did need minding. Given the way his sisters stared so hostilely at him, Owen suspected that Terran ones probably did, too.
“Okay then,” Court gave a demonstrative sweep of her arm toward the door. “We’re starting lunch. Get out.”
Chairs pushed back. People grumbled. The room cleared, though Owen probably moved a little more slowly than the rest. For once, he didn’t know where he was supposed to go.
As always, though, Luke had his own ideas.
“Come on.” He pulled Owen, and Ais by extension, toward the back of the house where the bedrooms were. Owen didn’t know who was sleeping with whom, anymore, but the room Luke pulled them into was cluttered with a veritable pile of mess. Clothes. Technology. Papers. Everything was haphazardly piled, and Owen could barely make out where the beds started and ended.
Luke chuckled nervously and cleared off a space on one of the beds. “Heh. Sorry. Me, Salehi, and Marco were doing a little work in here yesterday afternoon. Esteben kicked us out of the office because he needed to make some calls.” He guided Ais to the edge of the bed and had her sit.
Owen paced, though. He had too much on his mind to be sitting.
Luke paced along with him, saying nothing until Owen got annoyed with him being his shadow and plucked his arm.
Luke snorted and started cleaning up. “I bet Salehi and Eileen are already on the COM with Lillian making plans to scout out the Jekhan ladies.”
“If anyone could get enough ships to deploy all at once, she’d be the lady.”
“I want to be on one of those ships.”
Owen pushed up an eyebrow. “Yeah?”
Luke shrugged. “I didn’t come all the way here to do half a job.”
“Are you even sure you can go back?”
Luke cringed and started stuffing papers into a trash sack. “I feel worse for Precious and Marco. They shouldn’t have come. I mean, I did try to tell them not to. I was fully prepared to make the trip solo, but they showed up at the last minute and barged their way in.”
“You know how they are. You shouldn’t have told them.”
“Yeah. I know exactly how they are. If I didn’t tell them, they would have worked out what I was up to, anyway, and they would have hitched themselves to a star and followed my ass across the galaxy without my help.” He shrugged. “All things considered, the spaceship seemed the safer way to travel.”
“Was different for me when I followed Court. I already knew there was a strong chance I wouldn’t go back to Earth. When I left, I prepared to be gone for the long haul. I didn’t tell my parents that, though, and I don’t think Erin did, either. Erin certainly didn’t come here thinking she’d stay.”
“Do you like Jekh?”
Ais seemed very interested in his response to that question. She’d been looking before at the mounds of junk in the room, but she’d turned her eye toward them then. Owen didn’t know if she was going to like his answer, but he’d never been a liar.
“If I had my druthers, I’d be in Boston, but the Boston of twenty-five years ago when people would wave at a McGarry and ask what Mom was making for dinner, and not the one where everyone looks at us like we’re going to break into their houses and plant roaches in their kitchens.”
“Nice imagery there. Is farm life not suiting you?”
“It suited me for seven months or so, you know? The quiet was nice, and the isolation, but…I dunno. Maybe I’m ready for some familiar things again.”
“Well, I’ll be. The asshole is homesick.”
Owen rolled his eyes and turned to a taller pile of junk. The stack looked to be star charts. They were probably Salehi’s. “I’ll adapt.”
“There’s no reason you can’t go home.”
“Hmm?”
Luke leaned against the foot of the second bed and folded his arms over his chest. “Your granddad is going to go home eventually. Why can’t you?”
Why can’t I?
Owen hadn’t allowed himself to give any serious thought to the question, but perhaps he was overdue for some self-reflection. He just hated being in his own head—hated worrying about the future.
“Sentiment is on the swing,” Luke said. “People there aren’t too happy about what’s happening here. More and more are saying your granddad and the others like him were right. Maybe by the time your granddad is ready to go, you can go, too. And fuck Montana. Go back to Boston. Get an apartment somewhere and buy a razor and shave like a respectable person.” He looked at Ais, whose expression was stricken. “He used to actually shave. Hey? What’s wrong?”
Both Owen and Luke moved toward her, but Owen was slower. Always slower.
Luke knelt beside the bed, Owen behind hi
m.
“Don’t worry about anything we say,” Luke said. “We’re just shooting the shit.”
“Don’t understand,” she said quietly.
“Means we’re just making idle chitchat.”
She looked up at Owen, wringing her hands. “You go?”
Owen drew in a breath and gave the hair at the back of his head a painful tug.
I’m not a liar.
“I… I do want to go home,” he said. “But maybe that’s just a fantasy. I don’t know if I even can or if I’ll be able to when the time comes that I might be able to leave.”
“Have…no home.”
Finally, Owen knelt, too. He was no good at sentiment or at comforting. He usually left that work to others like his sisters or to Luke, but he had to do a little better for Ais. For whatever reason, she trusted him, and people who could trust him needed to be rewarded for their courage.
Resting a hand on her knee, he squeezed gently and carefully considered his words. The truth was sometimes harsh, but it didn’t have to hurt. “You, Ais…well, you can go anywhere you want. Live wherever you want. Here or Little Gitano. Buinet, maybe, when things have quieted down, or another of the cities. I hear the desert clans are welcoming, and that some of the old resort cities are beautiful. You have choices.”
“Why no Boston?”
He furrowed his brow. He hadn’t even thought that’d be a possibility, but his reflexive response was to shake his head hard. “No. Not after what happened the last time Jekhans were there. You can’t go to Earth. That’s not safe. I don’t know if Earth will ever be safe for you.”
She picked at the end of her braid that had started to come loose and closed her eye. “Oh.”
“You go where you’ll be safe. That’s the only thing you should be planning.”
Luke was cutting Owen quite the glare for whatever reason, but Owen didn’t have time to mess with Luke. He finally remembered something he could be doing. He stood.
“I’m going to go get a tablet and check the perimeter logs. There’s got to be some blips on them from when the Tyneali came.”
“If you think that’s important,” Luke said dryly.
“Yeah, I’d say it’s pretty important.” Owen looked to Ais who sat primly with her hands folded atop her lap, her eyes closed, and her lush lips turned downward at the corners.
Perhaps he’d never learn to make her hold a smile. He would have to make her happy to do that, and happiness wasn’t a fleeting thing. Happiness was something that required optimism, or at the very least, constant feeding.
Owen didn’t have the right fuel for her.
He closed his eyes against the sight, and swallowed hard. He was going to let her down again and again, and he needed to make her understand soon that she needed to guard herself. He wasn’t good for her.
He dragged his tongue across his dry lips and met his friend’s cool gaze. “It’s important, Luke,” he said, convinced that he was telling the truth. “What if they’re still here?”
Luke ground his teeth for several seconds, looked to Ais, and then shrugged. “Yeah. I guess we should look.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Reg didn’t see Hauge coming.
He’d been outside the designated carrel in the storage facility just beyond the Buinet boundaries, leaning against the piece-of-shit flyer he was supposed to fly across the damned continent, probably, and smoking his first cigarette in three months. Hauge had come out of no-damn-where.
Hauge had his fist locked in Reg’s hair, his arm around his neck, and his teeth bared like a rampaging lion. Seemed appropriate. There was a rampant lion in the Hauge family crest.
Fuckin’ bluebloods.
Reg blew smoke in his face, and Hauge squeezed tighter.
“All right,” Reg choked. “All right. You gonna kill me, or are you gonna let me do the job?”
“I should kill you anyway for all the inconvenience you’ve caused me. Are you trying to ruin me?” He shoved Reg hard, but somehow, Reg managed to hold on to his cigarette.
He put the filter end between his teeth and leaned against the side of the flyer. “Come on, bud. You gotta share in at least some of the blame for this.”
“For what?” Hauge narrowed his eyes and tightened his fists at his sides.
He was probably the only man in Buinet who looked just as threatening in a crisp, white shirt and suit pants as he did in a grease-stained jumpsuit. He was in the shirt and pants at the moment, which probably meant he’d been in town cutting deals…or getting out of them.
Money was fleeing Buinet like rats from an approaching flood.
“I gave you one simple job to do,” Hauge said. “You did that fine, so I gave you another and another. I plugged my ears on the rumors that you were running loads of coke while you were doing jobs for me, because that wasn’t any of my business. When I heard about your fondness for the local women and how they disappeared whenever you were around, I got a little worried, but I didn’t say anything then, either, because again—not my business.”
He grabbed Reg by the collar and yanked him forward.
Hauge might have looked like a Disney prince with his perfectly trimmed dark coif and bright green eyes, but he was a mean motherfucker when he wanted to be. That often seemed to be when he was around Reg.
“You screw me over this time,” Hauge said, “and I will personally bury you. I won’t care if you’re still breathing when I do, either. I’ll take great pleasure in watching you inhale Jekhan dirt and spitting it out only for the clods to fall right back into your face.” He gave Reg a shake hard enough to make Reg’s ass clench, and then narrowed his eyes. “Or maybe I’ll just strap you to a ship that’s heading straight toward a star. I don’t know if I’ll give you a space suit or a tank of air. Maybe I like the idea of you suffocating before you incinerate, but the idea of you shitting your pants as you get close enough to burn kind of appeals, too.”
Sadist.
“Fuck,” Reg said. “All right.”
“All right, what?” Another shake.
Reg grimaced. “I heard ya. You’re not playing around.”
“I wasn’t playing around before, either, but you not only crossed the lines of our agreement, but erased them.”
“Look, if you wanted things done a certain way, you should have done them yourself.”
Hauge put his palm against Reg’s forehead, slammed him back against the flyer, and clasped a hand down tight over Reg’s windpipe.
Reg’s cigarette seared his cheek and then neck as it fell to the left, and Reg kicked and punched trying to get out of Hauge’s grip, but Hauge probably had fifteen kilos on him. He probably spent hours every day slinging weights around in his own personal gym. He’d been born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Royal bastards got all the good luck.
“Find her,” Hauge said. “Bring her to me. You’re going to check in three times per day with me. If you don’t…” Hauge backed away from him and slid his hands into his pants pockets like he’d just been shaking hands and closing a deal, and not trying to internally decapitate a guy. “Well. I don’t need to tell you what I’ll do. Doesn’t matter. You already know you won’t like what I do.”
“Okay. I got leads.” Reg tapped the back hatch on the flyer and tossed his bags in. The sooner he got the hell away from Hauge, the better.
Reg didn’t have a single lead. He’d been waiting on one before Hauge had showed up out of the blue. He had no fucking idea where that bitch was, but he’d attack any scrap of information he got like a terrier. Any lead was better than standing still. If he stood still, Hauge would probably catch up to him again, and Reg didn’t think he’d survive their next “conversation.”
He got into the driver’s seat, pulled down the hatches, and locked them before Hauge could change his mind and decide that Reg had run out of chances.
As the flyer ascended to the maximum cruising elevation Reg could be in and still be able to receive COM transmissions from the ground, he l
ooked down at the storage facility.
Hauge was staring up, hands still in his pockets.
Reg couldn’t see his face clearly from his altitude, but he would have bet that Hauge wasn’t wearing a smile. Hauge only smiled for portraits, apparently, and he had a big one hanging in some castle in Scandinavia. Reg had seen it in the news. Apparently the painter was famous or something.
Reg circled around and programmed the flyer to make low-speed circles just outside Buinet’s city limits. He couldn’t go anywhere until he had a lead, except maybe to a strained contact who might have been able to get him a ship to get off the planet.
He tapped his chin, and put in the course change.
Getting the fuck off Jekh was the much better plan than actually doing what some Norwegian prince demanded. Hauge’s daddy could go fuck himself.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“Here, Ais,” Luke said the following morning. “I want to show you something.”
Ais scooted over to make room for him on the bed. She lifted the headphones she wore, paused the Terran film she’d been listening to, and turned her good eye toward him.
She waited for her vision to focus well enough to discern that the picture on the tablet he held was of a pair of women. They were young with red hair, and dressed in the traditional style for Jekhan women, though that was all she could discern. She couldn’t tell how ornate their frocks were or make out their facial features. “What is?”
“Amy found these pictures.” Owen lifted Nestor from his spot at Ais’s left side and took his seat. For so many hours, he’d been close, but far away. She’d hoped that after he’d pulled her into his lap for comfort the day before that he’d be more driven to keep her close, but he’d been increasingly distant. She didn’t understand him one little bit.
“One of the rebels in Buinet managed to get into the old government buildings and got the servers online,” he said. “There were some images in the archives. Amy was digging for census lists so we could start compiling lists of missing people the best we can, and she stumbled onto the albums. That’s your mother and aunt.”