Pet Trade

by Carol Van Natta

  He checked his internal chrono. “We better start collecting your gear, and I need to check the barn.” He pointed a thumb toward Jynx. “I’ll send Trouble out to keep an eye on these two.” Axur had yet to be able to crack the encryption on the e-dog’s command processor that Bethnee had told him about, but he kept trying.

  Back in his living quarters, he found Bethnee leaning against the kitchen counter, holding her small veterinary surgical suite. “I’d like to try removing your tracers.”

  He blinked in surprise. “Now? Are you sure?”

  “Hell, no, but it’ll be worse if I give myself time to think about it.” She searched his face. “Unless you don’t trust me?”

  “I trust you with anything except making coffee. Where do you want me?”

  “Chair, I guess.”

  He hesitated, then pulled off his shirt and sat. “Let’s try this first.” Jumpers gave up caring about nudity in the first ten-day of training, but she might not be so comfortable, especially considering his gender. He held out his hand.

  She opened the suite, exposing the instrumented interior, then swallowed visibly and took slow steps toward him. “Talk to me. Tell me how you escaped the shitheads who put tracers in you like you were a lab animal.” She rested trembling, cool fingertips on the back of his hand. “I like the sound of your voice.”

  He described how he made off with hoarded supplies, including extra batteries and tools, and hijacked the freighter. A lucky torpedo right before he went transit forced him to reprogram the navcomp on the fly to exit at Del’Arche, where he skidded in on a failing system drive and scorched, cracked atmosphere wings. He used the debris to build his shelter.

  She trembled the whole time, but she found and excised the tracers in his wrist, upper arm, and both of his shoulder blades. The surgical suite made it quick and nearly painless. The tracers under his collarbones were harder for both of them. Tremors wracked her, but she stuck to her task. He closed his eyes, but the butterfly touch of her cool fingers and the warm female scent of her saturated his senses. He could no more prevent his erection than he could prevent his satellite uplink from broadcasting. He prayed to the constant stars she wouldn’t notice, or he’d never see her again.

  When the suite sounded its completion chime, she pulled it off and lurched toward the front door to slide it open. She panted like she’d been running low on oxygen in her space exosuit.

  After a moment of indecision, Axur climbed to his feet and pulled on his shirt, letting it hang loose over the front of his pants.

  She turned back to him, looking pale and exhausted. “Sorry. I’m a warped mess.” She brushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “You’ve got four more.” A tear fell. She brushed it away absently.

  “That’s enough for today. If the CPS is close enough to ping-trace the rest of them, I’m as good as iced, anyway.” He picked up the crate with the rest of her supplies. “No need to apologize for negative stress feedback. I’ve had it, and it’s no less debilitating because it’s just in your mind. Jumpers are lucky enough to get quick support and professional treatment from top-level minders and medics.”

  She gave him a watery smile. “I thought you said Jumpers ate pain for breakfast.”

  “We do. But we acknowledge the pain for each other, so no one has to carry it alone.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, hoping to drain off the anger he felt at what he’d lost, what they’d both lost. “We look out for each other, because no one else will.”

  8

  * GDAT 3241.264 *

  A hard fall off her glide board onto her bad leg left Bethnee barely hobbling as she let herself into her cabin. The added weight of her vetmed kit brought clawing pain with every step as she re-armed the security systems and checked the logs and the analog telltales. No one had bothered her in the two years she’d lived there, but carelessness was no longer in her nature.

  She made halting progress to the cave’s kitchen, escorted by her pets. She couldn’t afford to be disabled, or she and the animals would go hungry. She wished Axur hadn’t suggested they try to heal her leg with the autodoc, because she was tempted to take him up on the offer.

  It had been five days since she and Axur had fixed Jynx—and since Bethnee had failed to finish removing the tracers from Axur. He pinged her that night and since, as if nothing had changed. Maybe it hadn’t for him, but her world had tilted on its axis.

  She’d willingly touched a warm, half-naked man. Her dark, horrific memories had lost some of their power. Maybe it was time and distance, but more likely, it was the healing balm of Axur. Handsome, resilient, clever, caring Axur, who resurrected memories of her younger days when sex was sweet and teenage dreams brimmed with passion and romance. Those memories used to belong to a forgotten stranger, but she could almost believe they were hers again.

  Most of her reaction when she’d removed the tracers had been fighting the impulse to touch him, like a lover. It scared and exhilarated her. And the realization that he’d been sexually aroused by skinny, scarred her had made her almost forget to breathe. She’d let him think she was still afraid because he was a man with the power to break her body, when the truth was, she was newly terrified that he had the power to shatter her heart.

  She could remain silent and maintain the friendly status quo, but could she live with herself if she did? She wasn’t Jumper brave, but she’d worked so hard not to let fear rule her. It wasn’t fair to either of them for her to stand in the doorway like a cat, neither going all the way out or in. She didn’t know what he wanted, but she’d never find out if she didn’t ask. She tapped her Axur-net earwire and waited for his response.

  “Hey. I’m glad you pinged. I have an idea for fixing my broadcasting comms problem, but I need your help.”

  His voice sounded like he was right next to her, whispering into her ear, making her stomach flutter.

  “Sure.” She took a deep, steadying breath. “What do you want in trade to use your autodoc to fix my leg?”

  The weak winter sun turned the snow glossy as Bethnee looked out the window of Axur’s home. She hated being a patient, but knew she’d be just as attentive if Nuñez or Axur got hurt, so she accepted his coddling. In moderation.

  “I thought I told you to stay off the leg,” said Axur.

  She turned to watch as he rolled in a cart filled with tools and equipment. “I hopped.”

  He rolled his eyes. “You’re worse than a combat Jumper.” He pointed to the chair and footrest he’d rigged for her. “Sit.”

  She hopped back and eased herself down. “It’s boring.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s why you’re going to help me crack my second processor.” He pushed the cart next to her chair, then put his stool next to it. “You need to eat like a Jumper today. Are you hungry yet?”

  “No. Shaky, though.”

  “Am I too close?” He started to move the stool, but she put her hand on it.

  “No.” She pointed to the space just in front of her. “Sit and tell me what you want me to do.” When he hesitated, she added, “You’re still a yak.”

  He sat, watching her carefully as he did. She sent out a thread of talent to him, letting the solid strength of him fill her senses. Her new strategy had worked so far, even when she’d been pantsless in front of him and needed his help to lift her badly bruised leg into the autodoc. Admittedly, she’d had to reach for the minds of the trusting animals to remind her brain how to stay calm, but she still put it in the win column.

  “Yesterday, I finally cracked Trouble’s command module security. Mine looks similar.” He held up a small hexagon-shaped percomp and a longwire. “I’m going to jack in, but if I trip the kill switch the researchers contantly threatened me with, I’ll need you to reinitialize me. I’ll show you how.”

  “It’s sweet of you to not see me as a technological flatliner, but we both know the truth.” She stifled an impulse to reach out and stroke his arm.

  “That’s why I’m going to show you. I st
ayed up last night and built some routines to try if the normal sequence fails.” He opened a flat display and pointed to a long list. “They’re in order of what I think you should try first, but I added notes about what they do, so you can use your judgment.”

  “You did all this last night?” She knew he was a get-it-done kind of person—probably all Jumpers were—but this seemed excessive. “Why the rush?”

  He looked away from her, then back. “It’s like you said. I’m hiding up here. Letting my limitations imprison me as much as the researchers did. I only see you and Nuñez, and a few townspeople for trades. I was good at being a Jumper, but that’s gone, so I need a new career.”

  The thought of losing him burned like a beamer through her heart, but she couldn’t begrudge him his freedom, any more than she could begrudge Jynx enjoying her recovered strength and agility. Axur’s premium skills and valuable ship contents meant he could move to a warm southern city. After what the Citizen Protection Service had done to him, he deserved more than a quirky little town of misfits and a damaged, graceless woman who thought of him as a yak.

  “Okay,” she said. “Show me what to do.”

  “I’m in! My uplink controller isn’t just similar to Trouble’s, it’s the exact same model, just customized.”

  It had taken Axur over forty minutes to explain all the contingencies he’d come up with, and less than ten minutes to crack his system on the first try. His whoop startled the cats and made Kivo dance in excitement.

  “Congratulations.” She couldn’t help but smile in response to his delight. “Once I extract your other tracers, you can be truly free.” Her bad leg was pins and needles, like she’d run into a cactus, but she’d take that over weak and numb. She slid her leg off the footrest and ignored the wave of wooziness that washed over her when she sat up too fast. “Fresher first, though.”

  “I’ll get your crutches.” He stood and gave her a stern look. “Stay put.”

  The natural light from the window made a bronze halo of his frizzy hair, which he’d grown to make him less recognizable. His short, darker beard highlighted his strong jaw. His thin knit shirt stretched across his wide shoulders and muscled chest, giving her the urge to snuggle against his warmth. She smiled up at him. “You’re an impossibly gorgeous man.”

  He gave her an assessing look. “I think you’re reacting abnormally to the recovery chems.”

  “Maybe,” she conceded. “Normal and I have rarely been on speaking terms.” A warm sensation flushed through her and pooled in her pelvis. “I think I could kiss you right now, and not even twitch.” She lifted her rock-steady hand up to him in invitation and smiled. “Want to experiment? It’d be for science.”

  “No,” he said firmly. “Not that I don’t want to kiss you, because I do, more than you know, but you are nowhere near capable of consent right now.” He backed away and shoved his hands in his pockets, making his shoulders and pectoral muscles flex deliciously. “If you still want to kiss me tomorrow, we’ll talk about it.”

  The afternoon passed in a blur as she alternately ate snacks and dozed on the couch. She was soon victimized by small animals that wanted a warm body to sleep on or next to. She dreamily watched him solving the mysteries of his uplink, thinking him brilliant and sexy, wishing she weren’t too impaired to savor the holiday from her responsibilities and her fears.

  She finally woke and sat up around the time he was serving dinner. “Am I allowed to try walking now?” She massaged her thigh gently. “I have more sensation in the lateral muscle than I’ve had in years.”

  “That depends. Are you still dizzy?” He gave her a sardonic smile. “Do you still want to kiss me?”

  She met his query with a steady gaze. “No, and yes.”

  He drew a surprised breath, then shook his head. “Use the crutches. Your brain isn’t exactly green-go right now.”

  She sighed, knowing he was probably right. Even if the weird chems reaction temporarily freed her to act on her desire to invite herself into his bed for a hot connect, it wouldn’t be pleasant for either of them when her old fears came back online the next morning.

  She levered herself up onto the crutches and made her way to the fresher, where they’d put her overnight bag to keep it safe from critters. When she returned, she put a package in front of him. “Happy Solstice Day.” She triggered her mealpack’s heater.

  He blinked in surprise, darting his glance between her and the package. His smile grew as he untied the twine and opened it. “Real coffee!” He held the cloth bag to his nose and took in the scent appreciatively. He held up the other gift. “What’s on the longwire?”

  “Common and relic language courses.” She pulled out the utensils from her mealpack. “You said you don’t have anyone to practice with. I only know Standard English and one city’s street slang, and Nuñez has mostly forgotten her family’s Tagalog, so I traded for the courses whenever I treated pets. You can help me expand my horizons. I need more swear words.”

  He smiled as he put the longwire in his shirt pocket and patted it. “Thank you.”

  Seeing how much the simple gifts pleased him, she vowed to give him as many as she could before he left for wider, warmer pastures. She must still be farked by the chems, because the thought made her want to hug him tight and cry on his broad shoulder.

  He triggered the heater on his mealpack. “I have presents for you and Nuñez, too.” Something on his cart beeped, and he grinned. “Excuse me a minute.”

  Axur returned with a small percomp strapped to his cybernetic wrist, and removed a disgruntled cat from his chair so he could sit. Beta promptly jumped into Bethnee’s lap and settled.

  “Okay,” she said. “Remember that I’m tech illiterate, and explain to me what you’ve been doing. I think I’m finally awake enough to keep it straight.”

  “I downloaded copies of my processor and controller software, so I could test things on the comp instead of me.” He pointed a thumb to his equipment cart. “Luckily, I exited the CPS research program earlier than they planned, so my tech’s code isn’t encrypted. The downside is, not everything works right, and they’d only just started training me on how to use it. I’ll need time to reverse-engineer it and figure out what I can do.”

  He talked between bites. “I turned off the uplink. I’ll be glad to retire my poncho. Then I purged my unique comm signature from the dozens of dataspaces they squirreled it away.”

  She nodded. “Sounds like the tech equivalent of the tracers.”

  “Yeah, that’s me, valuable research animal.” He finished the entrée portion of his meal in three shoveling bites. “I just finished a prog that’ll let me uplink with whatever signature I want and control it with the cybernetic interface in my ocular implant. Next, I have to figure out how to twist the planetary geomarkers.”

  “Twist them?” She frowned. “Won’t that mess up navigation around here?”

  “No, not the geomarkers themselves, just the ping refs that go with my signal. Most comms satellites record signal origination data along with the unique ID. It’d be suspicious if a flurry of new IDs all came from outside one tiny mountain town, or with no refs at all. At the very least, it’d trigger a settlement company audit, which would not make me popular in Tanimai. I don’t want my activities to trace back to anyone here.”

  “Why? What are you going to do?”

  “Download every hypercube of data and AI analysis from the orbiting weather system. Technically, it belongs to the Del’Arche government.” He scooped up the empty mealpack trays. “You said the satellite network was malfing at the time, but I want to look for evidence of my unexpected planetfall.”

  She chuckled. “Is that what Jumpers call a crash landing?”

  A corner of his mouth twitched in humor. “Dull mission reports mean no unwanted attention from High Command.” He glanced at her crutches on the floor. “Want to try walking?”

  She took a deep breath. “Yeah, but first, I want to take advantage of what the recov
ery drugs have done to me, so I can finish getting the tracers out of you.”

  9

  * GDAT 3241.264 *

  Now?” It would mean getting naked for her. His hormones were instantly on board, which was exactly why it was a bad idea. His unavoidable erection and obvious desire would likely traumatize her, recovery-drug high or not. If he ever hoped to take their relationship to a deeper level, she needed time.

  He took a breath, held it, and let it out. “I think we should let Nuñez do it.”

  “I’m not…” She trailed off. “Okay.” She looked away and dropped her head.

  He knew he’d hurt her feelings, but didn’t know how to fix it.

  She stood up slowly, using the back of the chair for support. She rocked from side to side, as if testing her balance. “Feels weird. Strong, but weird.” She started to take a step, then looked down at her feet with a frown. “I think I’m going to have to learn how to walk again.”

  “When they fit Jumpers with cybernetics, the physical terrorists tell us not to think about the mechanics, just focus on the intent to get somewhere.”

  “The whats?” She laughed. “Oh. Therapists.” She turned. “I’ll walk in here.”

  “Good.” He watched Bethnee limp her way around the couch several times. “Are you limping because you have to, or out of habit?”

  She stopped and looked at her legs. “Beats me.” She shrugged. “I’ll let you know tomorrow morning when we walk down to the flitter.”

  The satellite data he downloaded overnight was good, bad, and interesting. The network had indeed been offline for maintenance and hadn’t captured his entry from orbit, but anyone skilled in reading surveillance images—including the weather AI, if it was programmed to look—would recognize the landing furrow.

  The interesting data came from the settlement company. His query had inadvertently exploited a security weakness and garnered him the company’s backup hypercube of corporate data and correspondence. A younger version of himself might’ve hesitated to read it, but being made into a research project had scoured the shine off his idealism.