Roark (Women Of Earth Book 1)

by Jacqueline Rhoades

  “Your troop and supply ships are on their way and should arrive within the next few weeks.”

  It wasn’t what he wanted to hear, but there was nothing he could do about it. There was no fighting Military rules and regulations. Better to fight the battles he could win.

  Harm was sure supplies and equipment were being siphoned off, but could not yet prove it. Vochem suspected that the rations for the local population were being shorted as well. Roark needed more hands and eyes that he could trust if he was going to get to the bottom of what was going on in Sector Three.

  “Not soon enough,” he countered. “I have a warehouse filled with delicacies for the officers while the men are served glop.” He used the foot soldier’s term for the highly nutritious, dried and powdered root mixture that could be easily transported and reconstituted in the field. The glutinous concoction was never meant to be served in the Mess. “The troops have been confined to the base since they arrived. Do you know what that does to morale?”

  “There has to be a reason for that. I suggest you move carefully until you find out what that reason is.”

  The conversation went on, but Roark was bored with the constant reminders to use caution. His eyes strayed to the window that looked out over the central grassy square that formed the hub of the wheel of administrative offices surrounding it. Among the uniformed personnel walked the young woman who’d been injured two weeks before. After the unconscionable beating she’d received, he’d doubted she would return.

  “I can see you have other things on your mind, so I will bid you farewell. Take care of yourself, son, and know that my advice is given only because I wish you the rank and high honors you and this House deserve. I am so very proud of you.”

  “Thank you, Father, and my apologies for the rant. I’ll try to hold my tongue and my patience, but I make no guarantees. To see this world laid waste by the Hahnshin is a shame. To see it wasted further by our neglect is a crime. There is a natural beauty here worth saving,” Roark said, glancing down at the holo-figure before returning his gaze to the figure walking across the square. “Give Mother my love.”

  “Call her. She misses you,” his father laughed, “She worries.”

  The holoscreen went dark and Roark’s full attention centered on the woman on the square as she walked along the path that would lead her past his office window.

  There was strength in her walk. Spine straight, shoulders back, long legs swinging out the folds of her skirt, she walked with a confidence that surprised him. She showed none of the delicate vulnerability he had felt when she curled herself into his body seeking his comfort and protection.

  She was close enough now to see her face. She wasn’t smiling, but her look was pleasant and determined. It had the same confident look as her walk, until she paused to look at the small scrap of paper she held in her hand. It was then he saw it. If he hadn’t been watching her closely he would have missed it. A look of uncertainty clouded her sunny features casting her eyes and the corners of her mouth downward. She took a slow, barely seen breath, and when she raised her eyes again, the pleasantly determined look was back.

  She was nervous and feeling vulnerable, but she refused to give in to it or let the world see it. That hinted at an underlying depth of courage. Roark felt the little puff of pride and he smiled at his foolishness. He’d barely met her, yet when she looked up, scanning the row of buildings for the one she was looking for and her eyes met his through the window, his heart stuttered and the strange sensation made him smile.

  She smiled too, and it wasn’t one of simple recognition, but of delight. That smile made his heart stutter again, but this time he held back in his smile and simply nodded. Her smile didn’t falter as she nodded back and continued on her way. She didn’t look back, but when she turned to face the door she was looking for, that smile was still in place.

  Roark liked that, too. Most of the females he had met over the years would have taken his smile and nod as an invitation. They would have entered his outer office, insisted they see him, and greeted him with bright, cheery, and insincere smiles. They would fawn over him and offer, in subtle and not so subtle ways, their bodies for his pleasure. He’d fallen for it in his younger days until he’d been hurt enough times to realize that such women didn’t want him so much as his purse and power. Their numbers increased along with his advancement in rank.

  These were off-world women looking to survive the tides of war. As he aged, those earlier hurts evolved into a greater understanding of their motives, but he no longer opened his pocket or his heart. He began to choose his women more carefully, and made it clear that he offered nothing more than a few hours of pleasure. He had trained himself to want nothing more.

  He was a Godan warrior who’d turned away from the path fate awarded him at birth. He was wed to the Goddess of War and he followed her call across the galaxy. He needed no other woman in his life.

  ~*~

  On that first day, Mira accepted Ahnyis’s invitation to eat lunch with her. The offer was repeated on the second day and on the third, Mira just showed up at the clinic door, lunchbox in hand. She learned a lot from these lunchtime conversations and Ahnyis answered all her questions. There was one question, however, Mira couldn’t bring herself to ask.

  Children were disappearing and had been for some time. They didn’t vanish. They were taken away by Godan soldiers never to be seen again. They were the unregistered; children without family or ration cards. How the Godan found them, no one knew, but periodically, a group of soldiers would sweep through the neighborhoods and pick them up. People who asked too many questions about where they were taken and why often turned up missing, too, or so rumor had it. Mira couldn’t afford to become one of those missing. Her family wouldn’t survive without her.

  Still, she wanted to find out about those children because it might someday be important to her own. This job might provide the opportunity.

  The five children Mira and Wynne housed, clothed, fed and loved were all unregistered and so far, they’d been able to keep them safe, but the threat was always there.

  Mira also didn’t ask leading questions because she was afraid of the answer. She was growing fond of these strange invaders and couldn’t bear the thought that they might be involved with something she couldn’t live with.

  Mira liked her new friend, Ahnyis, who did indeed have a tail, a long, silky one that suited her somewhat catlike appearance. The tail also appeared to hold a sexual appeal for some men much like breasts did for others.

  “Vochem is always telling me to tuck it away as if every male who sees it twitch is going to drag me off to some dark corner,” she laughed. “He still sees me as his baby sister.”

  As she nibbled away at her cheese and crackers, the healer explained that she and the others learned the language while they slept in the life pods on the starship that brought them to Earth. It wasn’t true sleep, but an induced stasis that kept their bodies from suffering any harmful effects from leaping through space and time. Light years passed in weeks, and during that time, the mind kept working, absorbing any information it was given.

  “The hard part comes after we land. Learning a language from textcasts is not the same as speaking it to people who use it every day.” She started to laugh. “I learned my lesson the hard way on that one. I once told a table full of dignitaries I was pregnant when all I meant was that I’d had enough to eat. Full. The textcast never told me it was a euphemism for pregnancy. I thought Vochy was going to choke on his tail.”

  Mira laughed with her. “Just so you know, if a woman says she has a bun in the oven, you ask when it’s due, and knocked up doesn’t mean she was beaten.”

  “Are there many buns in the oven?” Ahnyis asked as she took another cracker and loaded it with a fishy smelling paste. She must have seen Mira’s hesitation. “Professional curiosity. In local communities I usually take care of the females and their offspring. Vochy and I have found that the females in new territories tend
to trust another female with that sort of thing before they’ll trust a strange male. And children love my tail,” she laughed. “Win the trust of mothers and children and the rest will soon follow. As a race, the Godan love children, particularly little girls.”

  It wasn’t only what Ahnyis said, but how she said it that made Mira take notice. There was a message in that statement, but she wasn’t sure what it was. Something in her stomach curdled, but she managed to swallow her mouthful of sandwich and tried to keep her voice as falsely casual as Ahnyis.

  “Why little girls?”

  Ahnyis was watching her closely. “I suppose it’s because the Godan can’t have any of their own.”

  Thoughts of missing children dissolved into thoughts of Roark. “What are you saying, Ahnyis? Are you telling me that Roark, I mean the Godan aren’t, um...” She waved her hand because she couldn’t think of a word she could use. She couldn’t very well say human because they weren’t, but that really wasn’t what she was asking. “Are they like robots or something?”

  “Of course not. That’s something entirely different, although there are those who hold some pretty strong religious objections to some of our medical practices.” The healer’s eyes crinkled at the corners and her mouth opened in a very catlike grin.

  “Ahnyis, stop teasing! You know what I’m asking.”

  “I’m not teasing. The Bodusak have very stringent notions... Oh, all right,” she said as if Mira had spoiled her fun. “The Godan are fully functioning sexual beings who for some unknown reason only produce sons.”

  Science was always Mira’s worst subject in school, but there were a few things she remembered. “What about that XY chromosome business? If a guy is missing one or the other, he’s not, um, fully functional. Right? And if he can’t produce those little Ys to make girl babies, he’s...”

  “You’d be right, if that were the case, but it’s not. The Godan have all the necessary genetic material. It’s just that those little Ys always lose the race. They’ve tried combining them in the lab, but the result is never viable. And here’s something else to turn your very basic education upside down. The resulting male offspring is always Godan, no genetic markers from Mama at all except for skin, hair and eye color. It’s as if the mother is only a vessel and a paint brush. Researchers have been trying to figure it out for hundreds of years. No one has.” The eye corners crinkled and the grin came back. “Strictly in the interest of science, and because your knowledge is so limited, I’ll reiterate that Godan males are fully functioning and rumor has it they function extremely well. As your healer and friend, I don’t want you to think about that before you go to sleep tonight and above all, I don’t want you to think about Roark. We females need our rest.”

  “No sex, no Roark, no problem,” Mira laughed. “I have no reason to think about those things.”

  But, of course, she did. By 3 AM she was ready to kill the little healer for her power of suggestion and the dreams that were the result.

  Chapter 4

  “If Sgt. Mohawk listened to the same textcast Ahnyis did, his book was missing a few pages,” Mira muttered as she tried to figure out his current message. “Or maybe whole chapters.”

  The man’s usage was atrocious and she wasn’t sure how he was chosen for the job of Local Communications and Development. It was either punishment or a joke, and the poor man had no idea how incompetent he was. He would become furious with any correction no matter how gently it was offered, but Mira couldn’t let the notices pass. No one would understand what was being offered.

  On her first day, he handed her a help wanted ad and ordered a thousand copies to be distributed around the city.

  “Operatives required for tedious holes in surface for alarm containers on outer limits. Reward waged on talent and capacity.”

  It took her half the morning and numerous questions in two languages to figure out what the notice meant and when she did, he didn’t like the result.

  “Needed: Heavy equipment operators, masons, and unskilled laborers for construction of early-warning towers surrounding the central city. Pay scale commensurate with skills and experience.”

  Fortunately, Harm showed up as she was being berated for twisting the Sergeant’s words. Harm, who held the title of Prime, though she wasn’t sure what that meant, was also a War Sergeant, which she’d learned was the highest rank a noncommissioned officer could obtain. He took one look at her version of the flyer and nodded to Sgt. Mohawk.

  “Good work,” he said, and Mohawk beamed.

  But did Mohawk learn? No. The next day, she was given an equally garbled announcement looking for workers to clear away the rubble of bombed out buildings so repair and reconstruction could begin.

  By Friday, Mira was doodling in the margins of her notebook. Every drawing was a little bowling ball head with beady eyes, a bushy mustache and the namesake haircut running between two little bumps that looked like the precursors of horns. The shape of the head, mustache and bumps were real. Since the man was bald, the haircut was her addition, as was the little arrow entering one ear and exiting the other.

  She also assigned Wynne the job of finding her a thesaurus since it was evident the man had a badly mangled one in his head. Surely someone in the neighborhood had one. It would be helpful to translate Mohawk’s English into the real thing.

  Harm stopped by every day to ask how things were going and if there was anything she needed. His short visits provided a break from the grumbling contrariness of Mohawk. She liked the gruff Prime and liked him more when he saw one of her Mohawk doodles.

  She’d tried to slide the paper with the unflattering pictures under a stack of others, but she was too late. Straight faced and stern, the Prime held his hand out for it, and red faced and mortified, she’d handed it to him. When he looked up, his dour expression hadn’t changed, but the weathered lines around his eyes had deepened. He handed the paper back.

  “That arrow won’t do a damn bit of good. There’s not enough between his ears for it to cause any damage.”

  Mira looked forward to her afternoons when she taught two classes each day which she called English as a Second Language, though it was more about cultural usage than grammar and vocabulary. Different officers attended each class and she soon learned that her students found the program’s title either offensive or amusing since all of them already spoke more than one language.

  She got the message in week two, when one officer asked, smiling with good humor, “Excuse me, good madam, can you direct me to the room where English as an Eighth Language is being held? I would happily attend this one, but I was born speaking two.”

  Godan was the unifying language of all who served under the Godan flag, but much like Earth, each country or independent state had its own language as well. A third language was used for communication between member nations of a larger political body.

  “Okay, I give up.” She laughed and raised her hands in surrender when one group tried to explain to her the web of languages, sub-languages, and dialects involved. “I chose poorly. I’m open to suggestions.” She moved her fingers in a come-on gesture. “Let’s have it. You guys don’t like the name. Give me a better one.”

  “Improper English for Proper English Speakers.”

  “Poor English for Officers.”

  “Ridiculous Words and Gestures.”

  “English in a Land Called America.”

  They finally settled on Basic Idiomatic American English.

  “I’m sure you realize that a name change will cause an exorbitant number of communiqués since the official name has already been filed with Supreme Command,” a serious looking officer in the second row intoned. He was a strikingly handsome young man, tall and slender with angelic eyes. If he was released into the city, the female population would be in grave danger.

  “So you’re saying that somewhere in a galaxy far, far, away, someone I don’t know is laughing at me, too.”

  He missed both the reference, which was expecte
d and the joke, which was a shame. While others laughed, he nodded solemnly. “Oh, no, only in this one. We haven’t gone beyond this galaxy yet.”

  Mira decided the female population had nothing to worry about. The poor man had no sense of humor.

  The exchange broke the ice and what began as formal lessons turned into informal discussions spoken in Godan and English. Mira learned more than she taught. She learned that Godan not only described a nationality in the same way as American or French was used, it was also a separate race of people and a strange one. She learned this when the discussion turned to greetings.

  She’d just gone over the common gesture of shaking hands and how it was sometimes accompanied by a clasp with the second hand or a touch to the arm or shoulder.

  “We have something similar. We clasp forearms.” The officer demonstrated with the man next to him. There was a shoulder bump after the clasp and Mira laughed.

  “Thus proving that males of any race or species have a lot in common,” she said with a wink to the three female officers in the class. “You also might see some more elaborate hand greetings that are definitely not required.”

  She coerced another young Legion Officer to be her partner and proceeded to demonstrate a fist bumping, hand wiping, elbow touching greeting David had shown her when he was twelve. He’d made her practice it over and over with him until he was smooth and perfect enough to impress his friends. It ended with a shoulder bump like the one they’d just seen.

  She thought the class would laugh, but when she moved forward for the final clasp and shoulder bump, her partner stepped back with a horrified look.

  “What did I do wrong?” she asked immediately.

  “You’re a female,” someone in the back answered.

  Ah, it was a guy thing, she thought, and asked aloud, “How would you greet a female? No handshake? No air kisses?” She demonstrated that, too.