The Initiative: Book One of the Jannah Cycle

by D. Brumbley

  Orion had to grin at the look on Khadi’s face as she slowly realized that Mercury was not only being serious, but earnestly helpful. “Khadijah, meet Mercury.” He ran his hands over Mercury’s back to reassure her. “She knows things.”

  “Sounds like she does.” Khadi said as she stared at her brother’s match. “Do, uh…do you study relationships a lot?”

  “Only in the last year, after I decided to take the matching program into consideration. I wanted to make sure that I was adequately prepared for a relationship.”

  “Uh huh.” Khadi wasn’t sure that relationships were anything anyone could prepare for, but she had to give it to the redhead for trying. “I think I’m going to get a strong drink from the bar. That seems like good relationship therapy to me. Do you want to come with me, Ry?” She was the only one to call Orion by Ry, but he didn’t seem to mind.

  “Yeah, sure.” He scooted over to deposit Mercury back on the couch with a heated kiss that ended with the tiniest growl to tide her over until he got back. “Finish that beer, you’ll feel better. I’ll be back with better.”

  “Alright. I’ll be here.” Mercury looked disappointed that he was leaving again, but she wasn’t going to complain. Watching Orion with his sister made Mercury smile. He was so obviously concerned for her, and she for him, judging by the many looks she shot back at the couch where Mercury was sitting.

  It wasn’t until they got further away before she said anything, but Khadi looked at her brother curiously. “She seems…interesting. Not your type. At all.”

  “I know, isn’t it great?!?” Orion realized that he was probably more excited than he should be, but he’d had a few drinks, and tended to get more wound up when that was the case. “She’s nothing like the rest of them. And I mean nothing. Not at all. It’s amazing.”

  Mercury watched the two of them for what felt like an eternity as they waited for their drinks. The time passed even more slowly on account of another man who had taken Khadi’s seat and was chatting her up even though she had no interest. She just wanted Orion to come back. More than that, she wanted to go back to his unit where they could spend time together and not worry about anyone else.

  “That sounds interesting.” Mercury replied distractedly to the stranger, though the man’s explanation and conjecture about what happened with Station Nine didn’t sound interesting at all.

  “So I think, hey, it’s about to be the end, what’s it matter?” The man was drunk, and the two friends with him even more so. “Any minute now, we’re gonna find out the Conshitium,” the word never failed to get a chuckle from one of his cronies, “has one of us planned for next. Just start dropping arms off the stations like petals off a flower. Flower just like you.” He reached out to run his fingers over the side of her dress, again to the laughter of his cronies. “It’s all gonna come down. Can’t go nowhere to get around it, can’t go back to the ground because we’ll fuckin’ die of the virus in a year down there…doesn’t seem like there’s much point in things, you know?” He looked her up and down, and his hand rested along her leg as he turned more into her. “Well, there’s a point in some things, I guess.”

  She tried to move away without causing a scene. “Sure, there’s always a point in some things. But I really don’t think that the Consortium wants to kill us all.” Mercury cleared her throat and grabbed her beer again as she attempted to use it as a barrier between them. “It, um, it was nice meeting you, Mister…”

  “Randall.” Instead of allowing her beer blockade, he took it from her and set it aside on the table. “And you’re not done meeting me yet, Red, so how could you know how nice it’s gonna be?” His hand returned to her leg, and he had his other hand braced on the back of the couch behind her shoulder. “You should come back with me and the boys. Got a pad up in the dockworkers’ quarters that’s better than this place. You’d like it. I know they’d like you.”

  Mercury shook her head and tried to pull away, but the couch didn’t give her much room to move. “No, thank you. My match should be back any minute, and I have no interest in spending time with anyone else.”

  “Oh, you know that’s not true.” He pushed up the hem of her dress, his fingers moving up her thigh as he leaned in against her. “Matched woman always wants to get out and see what she’s missing in the rest of the world. Just because a computer put you with one man doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give others a chance.” His two friends were still laughing at everything he said and did, and the two of them moved in more closely to form a kind of screen to keep her on the couch and keep out prying eyes.

  “Stop touching me.” She shoved his hand off of her thigh. “I told you I’m not interested in you, and I’m tired of being polite when you won’t get the hint. Get away from me.”

  “No need to be like that about it.” He wasn’t bigger than she was, but his hands were rough and he was clearly strong for his size. He shoved her dress up farther by force, his free hand grabbing her shoulder to press her against the couch where he wanted her. “Fine woman like you probably thinks you taste too sweet for the likes of me, and maybe that’s the case, but we’re gonna find out the hard way now.”

  He managed to lean in and leave a sloppy kiss along the inner curve of her neckline, still groping at her with one clumsy hand, before Mercury saw the two men in front of her start into an argument with something beyond them, barely visible in the ever-shifting lights.

  A breath later, she saw someone’s elbow fly as both friends tried to stand up and were shoved aside for their trouble. One man kept trying to fight, and Orion took his head and bashed it into his knee to send him crumpling to the ground, before he set his sights on the man with his hands all over her.

  Getting the man away from her was more a blur than anything else, but people scattered quickly once there was a brawl going. Mercury had a clear view of the beating Orion gave the man afterward. His two companions tried to get up and rejoin the fight several times, but Orion sent one’s head through the coffee table and the other went flying into a set of metal stairs a few feet beyond that. Orion saved most of his focus for her main assailant, yelling at him the entire time as he dismantled the man with military efficiency.

  Mercury was too stunned to move, still in shock at how foreign everything was around her. The place was nowhere she would have gone on her own, the people were not people she would have associated with, and the behavior was nothing she had encountered, since no man had ever touched her without her permission. She had certainly never seen a brawl like the one in front of her, even though she had seen medical patients a few times who had been on the wrong end of one.

  “What did you think? You could put your hands on whoever you wanted?” Orion ducked a few punches from the drunk easily before he stepped back to make the man swing himself stupid. “You think you can walk all over what she wants? Stop taking no for an answer? Wrong fucking move, jackass!” The man was clearly no slouch in a fight under normal circumstances, but he was no match for Orion.

  Orion actually stood and allowed himself to be punched not just once, but twice, before he retaliated with a set of punches that sounded like they had cracked a rib at least, if not broken the man’s sternum outright. “If a woman wants you, she’ll tell you. If any woman has standards low enough for you, I’d be fucking shocked, but…oh, you want a reminder too?” Orion got suckerpunched in the kidney by one of the friends, but he spun the man around, took a fistfull of his shirt and the back of his belt, then hauled him in the air and threw him at the crowd nearby.

  People parted quickly to allow the man to fall on his own, rolling a few times until he was moaning in pain. The second friend wisely got up and ran off, but Randall was still trying to get to Orion, unwilling to be made to look like a fool.

  Orion caught one punch in his fist and squeezed until it looked like the man was going to pass out, then pulled him in to wrap one of his massive hands around the man’s throat. His fingers sought purposefully up along the sides of the man�
�s thick neck until he found what he was looking for, and he squeezed more tightly, cutting off the man’s blood supply rather than his oxygen.

  “Go to sleep. You’ll wake up in a law cell on charges of sexual assault. Enjoy prison.” The man continued to struggle, but the way Orion was holding him, his feet were up off the ground and it didn’t take long for him to sputter and go limp. Orion dropped him on the tile floor like a sack of dead fish, and left him to finally go check on Mercury.

  Mercury was up to get to Orion as quickly as she could when he came near, and she held tightly to him. The shock had worn off, and she was glad to see that he was more or less unscathed after defending her from not one, but three men who wanted to see her hurt. “Thank you.” She said softly before she looked up at him. “I thought he would stop, or go away, I didn’t think he would…do that.”

  Orion nodded quietly, and put an arm around her tightly as he scanned the crowd, his eyes challenging anybody else to try anything. Instead of any other takers, though, it was Carl who appeared, with Jaz not far behind, the two of them obviously together and having obviously witnessed the fight from a distance.

  “Man, you didn’t leave me any? Really? Dick move, man. Dick move.” Carl looked incredibly disappointed as he got a good look at the assailants.

  “Feel free to go seconds on them. They deserve it. And call it in for me, will ya? There’s eyewitnesses aplenty and surveillance to boot. These fuckers need to do time.”

  “Already called it on my way down here. I’ll get them bagged and handed over.” Carl glared over at Orion and kicked Randall as he began to try and get up. “Stay the fuck down, idjit. You’ve done enough. Get friendly with that floor for a while, see if it likes you back.”

  Mercury looked up at Orion again as his sister appeared behind him, finally making it through the crowd.

  “Go on, get her out of here.” Khadi sounded legitimately angry that she hadn’t gotten there in time for the fight, but she was physically shooing Orion and Mercury toward the exit. “I’ll stay here with Carl and make sure everything gets sorted. I’ll call you later, alright?”

  “Thanks, Khadi.” He stopped long enough to give Khadijah a kiss on her cheek, though he didn’t let go of Mercury at all in the process. Once they were away, he saw her press the sharp point of her stiletto heel into Randall’s throat to keep him where he was on the ground, and he shook his head.

  Woe to any man who threatened Khadijah Al-Jabbar. What Orion didn’t murder first, Khadi would put through a meat grinder.

  It seemed colder outside the club after the heat of the interior, and Orion could feel Mercury shiver once under his arm. “I’m sorry.” He didn’t know what to say or how to begin, but it seemed like the best place to start. “Normally pricks like that get weeded out, but some always crop up. I shouldn’t have left you alone in there.”

  Mercury certainly didn’t blame Orion for someone else’s behavior, but she did feel hurt that he would leave her in an unknown place. “I thought he would leave me alone.” Her voice was weak, since nothing she could say would change what had just happened. “I should be able to defend myself, shouldn’t I?”

  Orion shook his head. “There were three of them. There’s only so much a person can do if the rest of the world has different ideas. You shouldn’t have had to defend yourself in the first place.” He guided her back through the halls a while in silence, eventually picking her up to carry her back across a few broken stairwells. “I’m glad things are better where you’re from. That people are more…civilized, the way you tell it. If they’ve got even half your class, they’re twice as good as this place.”

  She hung onto him until he got to a better section of the corridor and put her down, but still looked at the floor. “I can do just about anything with a scalpel, but I can’t defend myself for fifteen minutes.” She looked down at his hand holding hers and sighed. “Are we going back to your unit? I don’t think I want to go anywhere else.”

  “That’s where I was headed.” He squeezed her hand to reassure her, and swung their hands between them. “You’re not weak. And you don’t need to start carrying around a scalpel wherever you go. I don’t think that would work out well. Needing to be taken care of once in a while is nothing to be ashamed of. If anything, I’m the one who should be sorry. I enjoyed that back there more than I probably should. The beating up part, not the part before that.”

  “Are you alright?” It was only after they managed to get some distance before she realized that he might be hurt after going up against three men at once.

  He let go of her hand long enough to shake his hand out. His knuckles were bruised, but the blood on his hands was from the men he’d beaten, not from him. “It’s been through worse, don’t worry about it. I can’t even feel it yet.”

  “I can look at it when we get back to your unit.” She glanced down at his hand as he let go of hers, but it made her nervous not to be holding onto him. Was that who she was? Weak? Vulnerable? Who she had allowed herself to become in her sheltered life on Seven?

  Mercury didn’t say anything else until they got back to his unit and she could get a better look at his hand. “If we agree to a permanent relationship, it’s good to know you’ll protect me.” She washed the back of his hands and examined a few scratches over his knuckles, but there was no damage that would need stitches.

  “Of course I will.” He said quickly as she looked him over, giving her a confused look. “Did you doubt that would be the case when you decided to be matched? Thought you’d get a husband who would stand back and let something like that happen to you?”

  “No, I…don’t think anyone I would’ve chosen for myself would’ve been able to handle himself back there in a situation like that.” She ran her fingertips gently across his knuckles and kissed the top of his hand gingerly. “The men I know from Seven are academics, not fighters.”

  Orion hadn’t thought about it in quite those terms. “I like to read as much as the next guy, but some situations need something stronger than paper. Unfortunately.” He caressed along her cheek once she kissed his hand, and pulled her up into a gentle kiss.

  Mercury returned the kiss gratefully, holding his face afterward. “Is it alright if we just cuddle? Or watch a video or something? I don’t…everything that happened tonight makes me feel a little dirty. Not in a good way.”

  “Yeah, of course.” He kissed her one more time and put some distance between them, holding her hands to help her back up to a sitting position. “My video feed is probably turning about ten clicks long. I normally watch when I’m out on long flights. Obviously I’ve been distracted.” He smiled at her and squeezed her hand before he let it go, getting up from the couch to head for the bedroom. “Videos require pajamas and popcorn. Both of which happen to be available, coincidentally.”

  “Only a little bit of popcorn.” She said with determination, but she followed him to the bedroom so that she could change into pajamas as well. “If I let myself go, you might not want to be matched to me anymore. I have to watch myself.”

  “If you’re watching yourself, then you can see what I see. Which is someone I cannot imagine ever not wanting to be matched to.” He looked her over as she changed, pulling a loose set of shorts over his hips and a thin t-shirt over his head to cover his dog tags.

  Mercury smiled and watched him before she walked over to the small unit where he stored his clothes. “Can I borrow one of yours to wear to bed, then?”

  He smiled, and poked his chin at the drawers. “What’s mine is happy to be yours. Grab anything you like.” He headed out of the room to let her change in peace, and she heard popcorn popping shortly after.

  Mercury took her time undressing, eventually deciding on underwear and a worn t-shirt of Orion’s as pajamas. It was a dark t-shirt with a band logo over the front of it, and since he was so much taller than she was, it looked like a cocktail dress on her. When she came out, she gathered her hair into a sloppy red bun on the top of her head before s
he went to sit down on the couch and wait for him. “Where did you get this shirt? It looks like you like to wear it a lot.”

  He smiled at her from the kitchen where he was waiting for the popcorn. “You have good taste in shirts. That was a concert I went to back when I was seventeen. Few weeks before my eighteenth birthday.” His tone had started out light, but mentioning his eighteenth birthday chased the smile away from his face. “Band was Lunar Power. Great show. My brother took me.”

  “Maybe I can listen to some of their music sometime?” Mercury watched him quietly after that until the popcorn was finished. “Is it a bad memory?”

  “No, no, the concert was great. It was a good show, Khadi was there, Ahmed, Misha, it was a good time.” He took the popcorn out when it was ready and gingerly worked on emptying it into a bowl. “It’s a good memory, but it was also the last time I saw him alive. He died in a debris-field accident three weeks later.”

  “I’m sorry.” She looked down at the shirt again afterward, wondering if she should wear it at all if it was something he cherished. “I can go change. I read in your file that your brother had died, but it didn’t say how.”

  “No, keep it on. It’s a favorite for a reason.” He gave her a reassuring smile as he crossed the room, and pulled her into a brief kiss to let her know he was serious. He settled into the corner of his couch and pulled her against him to relax. “It was four years ago, I’ve had plenty of time to process. You don’t have to worry about upsetting me by talking about it. He was a pilot too, flying a hop from Prime out to one of the lunar orbitals. On the way back, there was a bunch of shrapnel from an explosion. The orbit had decayed as he was coming back inside Earth orbitals. Wasn’t on anyone’s radar, nobody could have seen it coming. Nobody’s fault. I’ve seen the telemetry. Ship’s systems got shredded in a matter of seconds and there were no survivors.”

  “Being a pilot is a dangerous job. I’ve seen a lot of injuries from it, people who were seriously injured or permanently crippled. I hope nothing like that ever happens to you.” She curled into his side and kissed his cheek gently. “I like you more and more every day, Orion. I want things to last between us.”