by Jack Robuck
Rachel sauntered to the table by the window. "More directly affecting your immediate situation, however, cowboy, is that you and I would be parting ways. And considering those sidelong glances you've been giving me, I don't know if you could live with yourself if you never got to watch me take my shirt off again." She looked back at him over her shoulder, waiting.
"Fuck you, Rachel, I don't need your bullshit, and I'm definitely not letting you control me with your...sexiness."
She looked him up and down. "Oh, yeah? Damn, I thought you were starting to take a shine to me, cowboy."
"Whatever. I don't know what to believe. I can't believe the entire Fleet is like Trague. I think you're just some kinda wannabe revolutionary who got a lot of people killed today because you don't like being part of a system that has to make a lot of hard choices."
In two steps, she grabbed him by the shirt and threw him into a chair against the wall. "Let me tell you something, you stupid asshole. I didn't grow up on a ship that suckled me with its cold slithery teat, defrosted my every meal, and made sure that everybody was in bed on time. So I'm very happy you take comfort in The System, but the System down here will chase you down and put a bullet in your head if it wants to. You're worried about your mother? Both my parents and my grandfather were killed by the Fleet. Just for not wanting to be a part of the System."
Matthew was shocked. "I'm sorry, okay? I didn't know that. This isn't what we trained for on The Waverly.” He put his hands on his knees. “I just don't want to be manipulated. You don't have to flirt with me to keep me under control, I'm not stupid."
Rachel stomped over to the door, the weathered planks reverberating dust and straw under her angry steps. She slammed the door shut, and strode over to Matthew, pushing him back on the chair. "Well, apparently you are, fuckface."
"What? Stupid?"
She smirked. "Yeah."
She stepped quickly toward him, her right boot hitting the side of his foot next to the chair leg. He flinched as she reached past his face, grabbing the tall wooden chair back with her left hand. Her left boot hit the floor on the other side of the chair, and he suddenly felt her denim covered thighs scraping against his hips. She pulled back his head, sucking his gaze straight up into her down-turned face.
"You saved both our lives the day I met you, in a pretty fucked up situation. I never heard of anybody pulling any shit like that before. And you did it again today." One eyebrow shot up. "How old are you?"
"Eighteen and a half, how old are you?"
She tilted back her head and laughed. "Thirty-four and a quarter."
Her hair brushed his cheek. Her eyes were marbled emerald and lime. She slowly leaned into Matthew's face. He shivered and thought briefly that he'd very much like to count the freckles on her nose and cheeks, just before her lips brushed his own.
She pulled him in, her hand around his jaw and ear, her nails scraping gently across the back of his neck. She let him up for air, and his hands went to her shoulder blades, pulling her down. She laughed as she kissed him, and he smiled in return. She sucked in his bottom lip and nibbled at it, making his eyebrows knit.
She raised her knee, dropped her right hand down to her boot, shucking it, and in a heartbeat she had switched and taken off her left as well. Her right hand now holding onto the chair, she pulled Matthew in for another kiss, and arched back her neck, encouraging him to work his way down to her clavicle. Feeling a stirring down below, she reached down and unzipped his pants. She pulled his face back up to hers, brushing the tip of her nose across his, back and forth, and kissed him again, as her hand worked up and down inside his pants.
In a minute, Matthew's brow furrowed again, "Oh, fuck, no, no, no."
She smiled and kissed him gently on the cheek. "Oh, yes."
Matthew sucked in air, and held it, squeezing. He gasped. She could see the embarrassment build in his eyes before she felt the change in his pulse. She leaned forward and kissed his forehead. His cheeks were red.
She whispered in his ear, "What’s the matter, cowboy?"
"I'm sorry…"
"Shh..."
She pulled his shrinking member out of his pants, and, slowly worked it between her thumb and forefinger. She could see his mind working, he looked away, out toward the window, and she wrapped her legs around him and the chair to free up her right hand, pulling his face back to meet hers. "Look me in the eyes. You trust me?"
"Sure, I—"
She slapped him hard across the face.
"What the hell was that for?"
"Did I surprise you?"
"Hell, yes."
"Good...It changed up your breathing." She tilted her head sideways and smiled at him. She had a very attractive way of seeming mystified by his whole presence. He liked the crinkly furrows in the pale skin around her mouth and in the corners of her eyes that tallied all the smiles she'd ever smiled like that for anyone.
Matthew groaned. He could feel himself swelling up again in her hands.
"There you go, cowboy." Taking her hand away, she stood up and kicked out of her jeans.
As his eyes dropped from the edge of her linen shirt, down along the muscular furrows between her thighs and stomach, he felt himself swell to full attention.
She stood there in the hard sidelight of the sunset, biting her lip, her hair half-draped over one eye, her shirt still clinging to her slender torso by one button she had mysteriously left in place. Matthew took a mental snapshot he was certain he would never forget.
She straddled him again, kissing him passionately. He could feel her wetness teasing along the underside of him, causing him to break away kissing her and suck in air. "I never..."
She smiled. "That's alright. You want to?"
He grinned and put his hand back on her shoulders, pulling her down to him. She guided her slim hips over him and came down in a single swift thrust that he thought might very well kill him.
Grinding slowly toward him and away, she pulled his eyes back to hers again. "Quit thinking."
He groaned in reply, and she smiled. They kissed and kissed as she rode him. He put his head back and closed his eyes, concentrating on the texture of her shirt back under his hands, until she arched her spine.
She moaned, and her cheeks flushed. They grinned at each other. She pulled his head into her bosom. Her shirt collar tickled his ear.
He could hear her heartbeat against the right side of his face; he could feel the moist curve of her chest rise and fall as she thrust faster. Her left hand gripped the chair again, her right pulled his head hard against her body, and he grabbed her buttocks in both hands; she moaned as he took over control of her speed, but in a moment his hands were on her back again, and she kept up the pace, and gently stroked his head as he, muffled, whispered, "...Oh my..."
"Shh, it’s okay, cowboy." She slowed, teasing him, wrenching a shocked groan from where he was pressed against her chest, bringing a tight-lipped smile to her face. She rode him slowly, pulling out long and thrusting home quickly; the tip of her tongue snuck out between her lips as she concentrated, until his cries bordered on agony.
As he began to shudder all through his body, she could feel wetness leaking down his cheek onto her chest, and she pulled him up to face her. His eyes were wet, but his hands slid back down to her waist, around her hips, and pulled her onto him faster, and harder, and she kissed his tears and smiled.
"It’s okay," she whispered. "It's okay."
Matthew's moan and gasp for air brought someone to the door, but she shouted them away. He sat there in her embrace long after the sun had finally set, and the desert air coming through the window turned cold.
*
Natalie made a campfire that night, away from the town full of ears that might be either malicious or bored. For the first time since crash landing in a steel bucket, Matthew relaxed. Jimmy was talking to Natalie in a strange, slightly deeper voice, and after a moment, Matthew realized that he was flirting with her.
As he spoke,
Jimmy gestured with his hands.
“So I can't hear shit, right, because I'm locked in this escape capsule with the Doc over there, and this fucking maniac that Rachel picked up in a rebel outpost somewhere halfway to the South Pole, but I can see Rach and this fucking kid arguing with each other right as we're about to either hit the ground at a thousand miles an hour, or get blasted out into space. And I'm just shaking my head like, whoo! If we ever survive this shit, that friendship is gonna need some work.”
Natalie looked from Rachel, who rolled her eyes, to Matthew and smiled.
Matthew looked over at Glazier. “The stars look different from down here, right? Fuzzy.”
Glazier shook his head. “Don't get all romantic on me kid, I'm too old for you.” The group laughed.
Matthew smiled, but he could feel himself starting to nod off. The big dark sky and the vast flat desert were overwhelming, and the rhythmic flicker of the fire lulled him into a stupor. He perked back up as Natalie began to tell them her story.
"I joined the Fleet when I was still almost a kid. Just wanted to get out of the no-name town I was born in. My parents were born there, they never knew anything else. It’s far to the north of here, and a little east, so a little darker than Boomerang. The Fleet came by to stomp on us whenever it was convenient, and I figured it was better to be a fighter than a victim. I joined up when I came of age. Fought all over, and did a lot of things I regret now. I stopped feeling like a victim, and started feeling like a murderer. So I decided to get out.
“For a while, I did my job, and worked on a plan. I waited until we got a mission to go out to this criminal city halfway out to Noon, called Trifecta. It’s the perfect rat's nest. The gangs and the warlords fight each other so viciously that the Fleet rarely even makes the effort. The shadows are short, and they just circle the buildings all day. Hot as the surface of the sun. We got into this firefight with a local politician and his gang of screamers, and when the chaos hit, I faked a gunshot wound. My commanding officer screamed for me to get up, and I shot him in the face. Nobody saw.
“I dropped down over a ledge onto a lower deck, and popped an EMP grenade right there in my hand to wipe my tracking signal. When I woke up, I wiped the blood from my nose and crawled down, down into the under city. I laid low under a shipping tarp for three days. I was rad-sick and injured from the fight.
"Once I got on my feet, I became a gun for hire, working for the crime lords, using the skills the Fleet taught me against them and anyone else that had money on their heads, until I could get my implant removed and figure out which way to run. This black market surgeon who sent mercenaries on pick up jobs in a 10,000 mile radius provided both. Unfortunately for him, that surgery was his last.
"Afterward, I ran out here, and I bought the tavern with the credits I'd saved and stolen. That's it."
Around the campfire, everyone silently glanced at each other. Rachel nodded. “That's a hell of a story.”
“That's what happened.”
Rachel held up a hand. “I didn't mean anything by it. I believe you.”
Natalie shrugged. “I thought Boomerang was the frontier...that they'd never find me here. I never expected to get scooped up on a slave-runner in the middle of Main Street. They never even checked my neck, just took me for some Podunk local, I guess. The three people from Boomerang that I was captured with didn't last a month.” Natalie sat still, watching the end of a long stick she held char away in the fire.
Jimmy turned to Rachel. The firelight flickered in the reflection of his dark eyes. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, looking worried. “So now what?”
Rachel blew out her lungs in a blast of exasperation, and shook her head. “Something's not on the level. Blowing The Waverly should have neutralized the threat. But Trague was asking me weird, ambiguous questions, and I can't decide if it’s a good or a bad thing that I had no idea what he was talking about.
“I was preparing myself for the worst in there, but he almost seemed anxious. His little ferret was feeding him information, too, like they were working from a script. I think they decided I was useless a few minutes before you showed up.”
Jimmy rubbed his hands together, and held his palms out toward the fire. “That's really strange.”
Rachel nodded. “If he wasn't overconfident and completely nuts, we'd all be dead by now. I don’t know if he was under orders not to kill us, or if he just wanted to put us in a cage. All I keep coming back to, however, is The Waverly. We've gotta get out to the crash site and see if something survived the explosion. Something they can use against us. But I can't figure out what he could have wanted from me. He wanted to know why we crashed The Waverly into the surface. I should have thought that was obvious.”
She pulled her hair back behind her shoulders and met eyes with Matthew across the campfire. “You want to tell us anything we don't know about that ship? Top secret weapon delivery? Army of drone mechs sent to wipe us off the face of the planet?”
Matthew laughed. “I don't think so.” His smile faded as his mind turned to the loss of everything he had ever known. “It was just people. Thousands of innocent civilians who didn't care about war or politics. We didn't even know where we were going.”
Glazier nodded, muttering under his breath, “All gone.”
Rachel's smile pulled tight into an empathetic grimace. “I'm sorry. Nothing I say will ever make up for your loss. This war confronted me with a terrible choice, and I made it. I know I can never atone for that.”
She turned, looking back at the gaslights and glowing curtains of Boomerang in the distance. She rubbed her hands on her legs, and stood up.
“Tomorrow, we go out there to The Waverly, and finish the job.”
Chapter 8
"Let's move!"
Matthew woke with a start to the sound of knuckles on pine. Natalie opened the door a crack, looking like a brand new person. She wore her purple dreads up, a coffee mug in her hand, and on her hips rode two long revolvers with scorpion scale handles. She smiled and hooked her thumb down the stairs. “Let's go, kid.”
Matthew rolled over with a groan and stomped into his clumsy planetsider boots. This place is ridiculous.
He took them off and slipped his old slim shoes and pants back on, donning the linen shirt and herringbone vest in a sleepy nod to the concept of not being mistaken for a very skinny Fleet Trooper by a local. As he rolled up his sleeves and wiped his eyes, he could smell fried meat wafting up from the kitchen.
When he got downstairs, Rachel, Jimmy, Natalie, and Gusset were sitting around a circular wooden table tucked into a windowed corner of the room. Several dishes steamed or congealed on the table in various states of consumption. Rachel tossed him a biscuit.
Gusset leaned back in his chair and tilted up his hat. "Best get you that slice of ham on that biscuit, son. Eat that up."
Matthew thought back to the first time he had seen Gusset, riding up on a Giant Iguana, fighting enormous mutant scorpions. He squinted at him wearily. "Are your pigs giant too?"
Gusset, unfazed, considered for a moment. "Well, that depends, don't it?"
"On what?"
"What size is your pigs?" His laughter boiled over into a blasting guffaw, his red cheeks blazing bright around his beard and mustache.
Matthew pushed out of the swinging doors and stumbled down the porch steps. The group followed close behind. Natalie led them around back to a barn where several packs had already been prepared. A rigi-plast crate was unlocked and open. Neat trays of weapons had been stacked on the table.
Jimmy shook his head at Natalie. “Well, you're prepared for anything. But I think you might need a little therapy.”
Natalie stuck out a foot in his path and gave him a shove. Laughing, she pulled a long package wrapped in fabric out of the crate and began unwrapping it.
Jimmy looked up from the satchel he was filling with vacuum-sealed food packets. “What's that?”
Natalie smiled. “This is my baby. Picked
it up in Trifecta.”
She held up a long, gently curved sword with a small round guard, and a handle and scabbard wrapped in what could only be iguana skin.
Natalie hooked the scabbard onto her belt. “Not as flashy as a shock baton, but I'm more of a traditionalist.”
Jimmy put his hands on his hips and opened his mouth to speak, but after a moment simply said, “Damn.”
Matthew noticed that Glazier had a leather satchel over his shoulder, and was inspecting the scope on a long rifle. He seemed to be settling into the situation quickly.
Matthew frowned. "Jimmy, didn't you say the crash was three or four Earths away? We'll never get there."
Jimmy smiled. "That's still a lot closer than any other rebel team. Rebel Command is on the far side of the ring. And our little ship is pretty fast.”
Rachel tightened Matthew's pack straps. “Regardless, we're the ones. We'll fly two days to the Channel River, and pick up supplies in a town on the south side to avoid Gate City, then head the rest of the way in.”
*
Matthew sat back in the passenger seat enjoying the big trapezoidal windshield. For the hundredth time, he glanced down, puzzled, at the huge, wide river slowly flowing beneath them. "Why is it called the Channel River?"
Jimmy, flying by autopilot, didn't even open his eyes. "Because it’s straight as a rod. Like it was carved out by giants. Runs a quarter of the way across the planet, and dumps into a big circular ocean. Ocean's probably an old impact crater. River...no idea. Only curve in that thing is with the surface of the planet. Which isn't much."
“And what about Gate City?”
Jimmy shot him a look, and then turned back to flying. “Gate City is a lot of things. Admiral's headquarters on the surface for one, lot of Troopers stationed there. Big religious city, too. Used to be a rebel stronghold. We pretty much get dragged into the shit every time we go there. So we don't.”
