by H. E. Trent
The camera data finally loaded, and the three women stared mutely at the screen.
“I don’t recognize the flyer,” Court said after a minute. “The computer is saying it’s registered to someone named Edward Hauge, though. Run the name, Erin. Sounds familiar for some reason. I’ll go lock the front door.” As she went, she tapped the band of her COM. “Hey, all farmhands? We’ve got an unauthorized vehicle within the perimeter right now. If you’re indoors, lock down. If you’re outdoors and can go investigate, the landing appears to be around grid square G4. Don’t do anything stupid.”
Erin pulled up the search app and input the name.
Before Courtney was completely out of earshot, Ais heard Trigrian say, “We’re closest. We’ll go take a look.”
Be careful.
“I’ve got a hit,” Erin yelled to Courtney. “Well, a lot of hits actually. I knew that name was familiar. Edward Hauge is Ais’s father.”
Ais recoiled as if she’d been smacked and backed instinctively toward the hallway and her windowless bedroom.
“Take it easy,” Courtney said. “That doesn’t necessarily mean anything. People like Hauge own a lot of property on Jekh, much of which they lease out to less solvent settlers. That may not be Hauge at all. In fact, I doubt it is.” She tapped her COM wristband again. “Trig?”
“Hold on, hon. We’re nearing the landing coordinates now, and the doors on the flyer are open.”
“Can you see anyone in there?”
“Hard to tell from here. Give me a minute.” The connection went quiet.
Ais turned quickly toward her room and picked up her tempo.
She hated leaving the McGarry sisters to do the hard work, but Ais wouldn’t be any good in a conflict. She’d just get in the way. She’d freeze up in terror, and create even more chaos.
She was holding the hem of her too-long skirt off the floor, too busy watching the placements of her feet, so she didn’t immediately see the shadow at the end of the hall. She didn’t see the figure in the window until it was too late to turn back.
Something exploded, and the glass shattered from what she realized was a gunshot before she could scream.
And then the gun was pointed at her, and the man holding the weapon was shaking his head.
“I wouldn’t move if I were you,” came Reg’s voice.
That was his face. That was what he looked like. He hadn’t been so clear before, either because her eyes had been too bad to see him, or because whenever he’d been on top of her, she’d had her eyes closed tight.
He was a deviant with little-boy looks and a deadly weapon pointed at her head.
He shifted his aim to something over her shoulder and shouted, “Bitch, I wouldn’t,” to whoever had approached.
“What do you want?”
Courtney’s voice. The absolute wrong person. Ais swallowed. The situation was rapidly turning into a powder keg, and given her past with Reg, Courtney could be the spark.
“This is too rich,” Reg said, said laughing. “Oh fuck. When my guy told me to go to this farm, I didn’t put two and two together. Of course you had to run off to somewhere, right? Hiding out in the farm country like a timid little squirrel?” He chittered his front teeth against his bottom lip in what was likely meant to be an impersonation of the animal. Ais had never seen a moving picture of the creature so she couldn’t discern if his mimicry was accurate.
“Now that I know you’re here, I can handle you at my discretion. Got one other thing to take care of first. Be a good girl and don’t get in the way, okay?”
He leveled the gun at Ais only to tug it back toward Courtney. “Nope! Just stay there. I told you this isn’t about you, but if you want to be difficult, that’s fine.”
Ais felt the white-hot, searing pain in her shoulder before the shot registered in her ears. She crumpled to the ground, clutching her arm and panting hard because she’d never felt such misery before. No one had ever hurt her like that.
Courtney was at her back, pulling Ais into her arms. “Don’t say anything. Erin will get help,” she whispered hoarsely.
Ais couldn’t even nod. The pain in her shoulder was creating undulating waves of scorching heat down her ribs and up her neck, and she was afraid to move.
“Let’s go,” Reg said, far too cheerfully. “Both of you, actually. Might as well have something extra to bargain with.”
Courtney rubbed Ais’s arms and kept very still.
Reg sighed and battered in the bottom right corner of the window with his booted foot.
He was inside the hallway in a moment, and grabbing Courtney up by the collar. He tugged her close, mindless of her pregnant state, his lips so close to hers that there was a forced intimacy that would have scarred even the strongest of psyches.
Canting his head, he put the nozzle of the gun against Courtney’s temple. “I don’t really need you anymore. You’re used up. Worthless.”
“Does that turn you on, or is that small hard thing poking me just another gun in your pants?”
He shoved her back, hard, and as she scrambled back to her feet, Reg yanked Ais upright with her good arm. “Try me, bitch, and I’ll shoot her again.”
“No you won’t,” Courtney said calmly. “If you came here looking for her, I guarantee your motives weren’t love and attachment. She was just cargo for you, wasn’t she? She was a thing that you took figuring you could find some cunning use for, or maybe to sell or to fuck, but she turned out to be more trouble than you anticipated, didn’t she?”
“Shut the hell up!” He let go of Ais’s arm and stormed toward Courtney.
Courtney had her fists up, ready to fight—and Ais believed she could, in spite of her gravid state—but as Courtney’s fist arced toward his face, there was a flash of red in the hall, and streak of neon blue going past Ais’s head.
Reg’s limp body hit the ground.
The Tynealean male who must have walked in through the front door pushed Courtney aside and lumbered toward Ais, and there was another blue streak.
“I don’t know if this weapon can hurt you,” came the unfamiliar male voice with an accent unlike any she’d heard before. “If you take another step closer to her, I’ll shoot a couple of million volts between your eyes.”
Ais was afraid to turn to look, and Courtney’s expression gave nothing away. She was looking from the Tynealean male, who was so tall the top of his nearly bald head almost touched the ceiling, to the newcomer behind Ais, and tapping her COM’s band.
The Tyneali visitor took another step closer, and hissed in the way of his kind.
Ais pulled her limbs in tight against her body and held her breath. Good things never happened after one of those things hissed.
“You’re not taking her,” Courtney said. “She doesn’t want to go with you.”
He turned and said in his own language, “You understand nothing.”
Courtney couldn’t have possibly known what he’d said. She had just started learning Jekhani. Tyneali was a language several steps removed from that.
“I’m not playing with you,” the stranger at the window said. “Touch her, or even try to, and I’ll shoot.”
The alien reached for Ais anyway, and another blue streak illuminated the hall.
The alien fell to his knees, bellowing, and as Ais watched him writhe, she was scooped up quickly into unfamiliar arms and carried down the hall. The stranger stopped at Reg’s still form and kicked his side.
Reg expelled some air and rolled onto his side, doubling in on himself.
The guy with the high-power stunner pointed the weapon at Courtney. “Get him up. I don’t want to hurt you, but I will if I have to. Get him up.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Because I like to take my garbage out with me when I leave a place.”
Courtney blinked several times, flitted her gaze between the man holding Ais, the bellowing alien behind them, and Reg.
Then, slowly, she crouched and grabbed Reg hard by the h
air. “Get up,” she spat.
Reg groaned.
“Did you hear me? Get up.”
He rolled over slowly onto hands and knees, and Courtney tugged him upright by the back of his jacket.
The man with the laser strode quickly to him and put the gun against the back of Reg’s head. “Walk.”
Reg put his hands up and walked. “Look, man, I was going to—”
The man with the laser paused briefly to put his boot to Reg’s ass, and shove. “Shut up. You had one job. Nowhere in the description of that job did I tell you to hurt her.”
“Hurt her again,” Courtney mumbled. She must have been following.
Ais squirmed in the man’s arms, breathless from pain and shock, and confirmed that Courtney was at his heels, scowling and angry as Ais had ever seen her.
As they passed into the gathering room, she paused briefly to root one of the many hidden guns in the farmhouse out of a decorative vase, and dropped the weapon into her dress pocket.
“What do you mean again?” the man with the laser asked. He maintained his quick pace, and soon they were outside in the blinding sunshine, and Ais saw a figure approaching from the direction of the ridge.
He pointed the gun toward the newcomer, and Courtney got in front of him. “Stop. If you shoot at my sister, I will kick you so hard in the nuts that the stars you’ll be seeing tonight won’t be the ones in the Jekhan sky.”
Apparently, he decided she meant the threat, because he aimed at Reg again and got him moving toward one of the two ships that had landed near the house.
One was a low-altitude utility flyer, which Ais believed were designed for people who regularly slept in their vehicles. The other was a larger Category Four Tyneali search vessel. That latter must have been what had been fouling up the farm sensors for weeks.
The guy with the laser hustled toward the flyer and yelled at Reg, “Get in.”
Hands still up, Reg complied, and the man followed.
The stranger laid Ais into a narrow bunk at the back of the vehicle and spun quickly, pointing his gun at Courtney.
“You’re not taking her anywhere,” Courtney said.
“I beg to differ. She doesn’t belong here.”
“You don’t get to decide that.”
“I believe I have more of a right to decide than you.”
“Yeah? Well, here’s the thing. I’m not holding her here against her will. We’ve been keeping her safe for months. She hasn’t asked to leave.”
“You don’t know who you’re tangling with.”
Courtney scoffed, and looked briefly to Erin, who’d climbed aboard behind her. “Obviously, you don’t know who you’re tangling with.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’m getting off this farm before that thing in your house shakes off the stun I put on him, so you need to get off my ship.”
She folded her arms over her chest and shook her head. “You’re not taking her anywhere. She needs medical attention, for one thing, and for another, I’m not letting some strange asshole spirit her off this property. She’s been through enough already.”
“I’ll get her a doctor.”
“No,” Erin said. “She already has a doctor, and he’s on the way here.”
“We’ll be gone before he arrives.” He edged past the McGarry sisters and then tapped a series of flashing lights on the console at the front. “If you ladies don’t plan on visiting Buinet, I suggest you get off my ship right now.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Court said.
He pointed the gun at her.
She put up her hands. “I’m not going anywhere. You take her, and I’m going with you. I don’t know you, I don’t trust you.”
“I could say the same of you.”
“My name is Courtney Beshni, formerly McGarry. The piece of shit bleeding all over that jump seat”—she pointed to Reg—“makes me super skeptical that you’ve got pure motives, dude.”
His cheek twitched, and Ais finally took a good look at the man. Dark hair, paler eyes—she couldn’t quite make out the color—tan skin, and square jaw. Handsome, probably.
But scary.
Ais put her head back down and put a hand over her throbbing shoulder.
So much blood.
This time, she was certain she wasn’t supposed to bleed like that.
“You stay,” he said to Courtney. To Erin he said, “You leave.”
“And then what?” Erin said.
“I’m sure you’ll figure out a way to fetch her from Buinet.”
“Alone? I don’t think so. Court can take care of herself for the most part, but we take care of Ais.”
Even with her eyes closed, Ais could see the spiraling kaleidoscope of lights. Briefly, she’d thought she was going to pass out from blood loss, but the man with the gun shouted, “Fuck!”
“Where the hell did they come from?” Courtney asked.
Ais forced her eyelids up.
Through the front window, she could see another Tyneali ship landing, and that the lights on the first alien vessel had started glowing, too.
“That thing is up!” Reg shouted. “Come on, man, get this thing off the ground.”
“Shut up,” the guy with the gun said.
“Wait. What’s happening?” Courtney asked.
Capitalizing on their distractedness, Erin hustled to the back and tugged down the collar of Ais’s dress. She palpated around her wound, cringing, and then whispered, “Didn’t hit anything major. I’m more worried about infection and you losing blood. What’s your blood type, anyway?”
“I—”
The ground shook beneath the ship, and Reg shouted, “Fuck, what’s happening?”
“Are they fighting each other?” the stranger asked.
Erin knelt up and looked over her shoulder. “Oh my God.”
“What is happening?” Ais asked.
“The Tyneali that was in the house and I guess some others from his ship are fighting the other Tyneali.”
“Why?”
The flyer’s hatch snapped shut, the lights dimmed and, with a stomach-dropping lurch, the ship took to the air.
Courtney pointed the gun from her pocket at the man at the controls. “Put this flyer down now or I’ll give you a new hole to breathe through.”
Scoffing, he moved his hand over the console in a flash, and a moment later, the computerized voice, proclaimed, “Destination locked. Time of arrival, five days, twenty-five hours.”
She put her finger on the trigger.
He pulled his gun, too.
“Court!” Erin shouted.
And Courtney turned in a flash toward Reg, who was reaching for something on his person.
The man at the controls had his weapon on Courtney, she had hers on Reg, and no one was saying anything.
Court’s wrist COM chirped wildly, as was Erin’s. Their men were probably trying desperately to reach them.
The flyer canted violently on the buffets of air created by whatever had caused the violent booms down on the surface.
Ais let out a frustrated breath and gripped her bleeding arm. “Won’t last six days. Do I…need blood?”
“Maybe not. We’ll see, okay?” Erin said.
The dark-haired man shifted his gaze to Ais, and something like concern furrowed his brow before he looked back to Courtney. “Stop your COM from pealing or I’ll take it off you.” He canted his head toward Erin. “You, too.”
Both women hit their wrist bands.
“Court?” came Trigrian’s voice first.
“We’re—”
“You want her back,” the dark-haired man said, grabbing Court’s wrist. “You’ll have to wait. I don’t get off on harming pregnant women.”
Ais bit down hard on her lip. She didn’t want to divulge just yet that she was included in that population. She had no way of knowing how that man might behave.
“Erin, respond,” said Headron through the little speaker of Erin’s device.
Swallowing, she b
rought the band up to her lips and whispered, “We’re in the flyer that just took off.”
“What the hell is happening? What’s going on with the two ships near the house?”
“We took off before we could find out, but I think two groups of Tyneali are having a squabble.”
“Where are you going?”
The man with the gun moved farther into the back of the flyer, his weapon still trained on Courtney. He grabbed Erin’s wrist and said into the COM, “You don’t need to worry about where, guy. I don’t know who this lady is to you, but I didn’t come here for her. She’s a stowaway. If she leaves me alone, I’ll leave her alone.”
“Who the hell are you?”
He leveled the gun at Courtney. “Shut that off. Tell your friend goodbye.”
“Not my friend,” she hissed. “My child’s father. Start explaining yourself now, or so help me, I’ll take my chances and I’ll start shooting at that console until that navigation lock releases.”
“Headron, honey,” Erin said quickly, “I’ll call you back.” She turned the COM off and pulled Ais into her arms.
For whatever reason, Ais didn’t think that guy was going to shoot either of them, but that didn’t mean they didn’t need to be careful of him all the same.
He grabbed Reg by the collar and canted his head toward Erin. “Come here and pat him down. Check him for weapons.”
“I’m going to make a wild guess that he’s not a friend of yours,” Courtney muttered.
Reg rolled his eyes. “Shut up, bitch.”
“If we weren’t in the air, I’d put a bullet through each of your kneecaps,” she said.
“Stop,” the dark-haired man told her.
She shrugged. “You think I’m joking, dude. I’m not. I’m not just holding this weapon because I think it makes me look cute. I have three different badges gathering dust in my house from my last career. I have training to use this piece, and I won’t hesitate to pull the trigger if I think you intend to do mortal harm to myself or either of those women.”
Erin tossed a couple of knives away from Reg and yanked what looked to be a pocket stunner out of his grip.
“Sit down,” the man told him.
Reg slumped into the jump seat looking murderous.