Wager: A Sci-Fi Romance (The Jekh Saga Book 4)

by H. E. Trent

  “Well, no. This is new. I’ve been wearing these leggings for the past few days. I have to admit that what they lack in convenience, they have in ease of movement. I don’t like feeling so exposed, though.”

  “I wouldn’t call that exposed.” In fact, the Jekhan-style dresses were far more provocative in certain light due to the lightness of the fabric. He could hardly go a day without catching the outline of a nipple or the shadow between a woman’s thighs. For the most part, he compartmentalized all those could-be-tantalizing sights because those women usually belonged to some man or men, but Sera didn’t belong to anyone.

  Not yet, anyway.

  “You can see the shape of my legs,” she said.

  “True.” She had a dancer’s gams, and the posture of one, too.

  “Some of my elders would find that appalling,” she said.

  “If they do, they’re jealous.”

  She expelled a dry laugh and folded her arm over her chest. “If you say so.”

  “I do. You’re a beautiful woman, Sera.”

  “I…” She looked down at her hands and picked at one of her nails. “Thank you. I’ll leave you to your rest.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t.” He’d finally gotten her to talk to him, he didn’t want her to leave. He wanted her curled up next to him, rubbing her careful hands down his chest and lower until all the feeling came back. He wanted to find out if her sweet red lips tasted like cherry.

  He’d gone too long without affection. For too long, he’d lied to himself and said he didn’t need any.

  He still had to be patient, though. Waiting was part of the deal.

  Clearing his throat, he lifted his eyebrows at her. “Is there anything in this metal box I can do to entertain myself?”

  “Oh, well, there’s a entertainment screen mounted overhead.” Energized again, she pointed to the device. “You could watch a film.”

  “True. I could do that.”

  “Or listen to a book.”

  “Also true. I like books.”

  “Then, I’m sure you’ll find something engaging. I happen to like Stephen King. Do you know of him?”

  “Hard not to. He’s got a few I haven’t read.”

  “Oh. Good.” She nodded resolutely, glanced down at her COM, and began to back toward the door. “Maybe we can discuss them later. A few things about them confuse me. Context I’m missing, I suppose.”

  “Yeah, let’s do that,” he said at the same time she said, “I really must go. The rain—”

  “Right, right,” he said, sounding more cheerful than he felt. “Go ahead. Wouldn’t want you catching pneumonia on my account.”

  “So much to do,” she whispered as she pivoted on her heel, sending her heavy hair swaying hypnotically as she went—though that dizzied response may have been the painkiller’s effect on Jasper—only to stop abruptly at the door.

  Marco was in the corridor, shirtless, sooty, and holding not a blowtorch, but what looked like a pair of bolt cutters.

  Sera took a startled step back, growled softly, and then squeezed past him without a word.

  Marco watched her leave, staring down the corridor until the hatch’s decrepit cranks clicked. Then he looked at Jasper, warily, it seemed.

  “Everything all right?” Jasper asked. He was obviously missing some context, the same as Sera had been. “What’d you do to earn the famous Merridon Disregard?” Cringing, he pushed himself up straighter and reached for the first of the drug doses. He lifted the lid on his meal, too. It looked like some sort of egg casserole.

  Nice.

  “Nothin’,” Marco said, leaning against the doorframe. “All right if I come in and do some banging? Not sure how your head is right now.”

  Jasper waved him on in. “Come on. My head hurts, but it’s getting better with each passing minute. Might as well start the work before I get too comfortable.”

  “Good plan.”

  “What’s happening around here?” Jasper swallowed down the viscous syrup and made a blech sound. The concoction tasted like some gnarly combination of crushed aspirin, whiskey, and maple syrup, and he hoped the next one went down much smoother or else Dorro would have to start administering the shit to him while he slept. The shit was repulsive. “Did you hear from Luke, by the way?”

  “Yeah. A few hours ago, actually.” Marco pulled a chair to the center of the room and, after testing the seat with a foot to ensure it would bear his weight, slowly stood on it. He had to hunch, though. Given his height of at least six-and-a-half feet tall, he had to stoop in the ship most of the time. He gave the metal panel overhead a thump with the end of the wire cutter. When the panel dislodged, he raised it out of the way, and poked his head up into the space. “Yo! Salehi?” he called out.

  “Yeah,” Salehi’s voice echoed back a moment later. “Gimme a sec. See if you can get that electrical panel open while you’re waiting.”

  “Yep.” Marco put the bolt cutters up into the cavernous space and started fiddling with something inside. “Anyhow,” he said to Jasper. “Luke and them got to the bunker last night and ended up having to make camp outside.”

  “Damn. I hate missing a good adventure. I wish I could be there. They couldn’t get in?”

  “Nope. The information Owen has in the data pod the Tyneali gave him said that the door is supposed to open automatically when a certain signal is transmitted. Didn’t work. Luke thinks someone inside jammed the mechanisms so no one could get in.”

  “Jammed by Tyneali people?”

  “No.” Marco grimaced and shook his head. “Nothing as sophisticated as what they’d do. The interference they were getting was kind of crude. Kind of like someone had tried to watch a master at work and when the master turned his back, they tried to duplicate what they saw but weren’t as good at it.”

  “But what they did was good enough to keep them out, right?”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “More details. Come on. Give ’em.” He was dying for some tech talk. He rarely got to shoot the shit with anyone anymore.

  “I’ll get you some. Luke was sketchy on the details. He was in a bad mood for some reason.”

  “Huh. I wonder why.”

  “You got the panel open, Marc?” Salehi called out.

  “Yeah,” Marco called back. “I’m about to kill the power to this line.” Marco ducked down and gave Jasper a pointed look. “Might want to turn on your COM band’s light. I’ve got to turn off the electricity in here so I can pinch some lines.”

  Jasper gave him a dismissive wave. “No need. If the pinprick of light from the window isn’t enough, I’ll feel my way around. The dark’s probably better for my head.”

  “You’re probably right. I’ve heard some interesting stories about Dorro’s pharmaceuticals.”

  “Interesting in what way?”

  Marco didn’t answer.

  Oh hell.

  The lights went out.

  Salehi yelled, “Give me ten minutes on my end. I’m crawling inside. If you hear a crash, send for a paramedic.”

  Marco chuckled and called back, “The only paramedic around here is Erin, and I think she’s retired from the gig. She’s got a pretty poor bedside demeanor, anyway.”

  “Gotta love those McGarrys.”

  “Yep. You kinda gotta.” Marco moved in and out of the room, carrying tools and bits and pieces of technology.

  “You don’t know anything else about that jammed door?” Jasper asked, patting the side table somewhat blindly for a fork.

  “Well, let me think.” Marco moved close enough to the bed that Jasper could see that his brow was furrowed. “Oh, well, they’re reasonably certain they can undo whatever programming the folks inside did, but they want to try a gentler solution first. They’re going to try to send messages through the security system to the people inside to let them know who they are and why they’re out there.”

  “Smart.”

  “Luke and Owen are usually pretty good at coming up with so
lutions when they put their heads together.”

  “They work good together, huh?”

  “Yeah.” Marco handed Jasper the fork he’d been fumbling for and moved back to his chair. “Always have. I used to be kinda jealous about their closeness, but I grew out of the envy.”

  Feeling pretty jealous himself, Jasper chuckled and put the casserole dish on his lap. “When and how?”

  “Shamefully late, I have to admit. I think I stopped caring sometime after Luke left for college. The fact is, they work so well together because they don’t have to try to. I guess they have innate understanding of how each other thinks so they’re really good at guessing what the other’s conclusions would be.”

  Salehi shouted from somewhere up above, “For fuck’s sake!” and then added something in what was probably Arabic, and—knowing Salehi—likely vulgar.

  “What happened?” Marco yelled back.

  “Corrosion. I’m wondering how this thing was space worthy for as long as it was. We shouldn’t have been flying it.”

  “Shit,” Marco muttered.

  “Shouldn’t be corroded at twenty years, though, right?” Jasper called up. He knew a little about those Class 18 cargo ships. They may have been slow and no-frills, but they weren’t cheaply made.

  “Right,” Salehi yelled. “That shit-for-brains ass boil Reg Devin was using the duct space to hide shit. I have no idea what’s in some of the hermetic packets I’m finding, but I’ll leave that to someone else to figure out.”

  “Ooh, let me,” Jasper said dryly. “I love a good chemical mystery.”

  Marco said into the ducts, “Escobar said he’ll do the analysis.”

  “He’ll probably find a way to blow it all up,” Salehi said.

  Jasper shrugged when Marco looked his way. He wasn’t going to lie. If there was the potential to make a nice, controlled explosion, Jasper would probably try to make one happen.

  “For science,” Jasper said, grinning.

  “Yeah, you fit right in around here, don’t ya.”

  Hope so.

  “I’ll make a pile in the cargo bay for him to sift through later,” Salehi said.

  “Excellent. I look forward to the challenge.” Jasper squinted at the table.

  One of those lumps had to have a beverage inside. Dorro’s concoction had left his mouth feeling even more like a desert floor. He was about to flick on his COM’s weak light but Marco arced around the room, picked up a canister, put it in Jasper’s hand, said, “Drink that,” and then left.

  “Okay, then,” Jasper said, popping the top open. “Shoot. I could get used to folks reading my mind. Less work for me.” Craning his head toward the open door, he yelled out, “Thanks, Marco.”

  “Yep.”

  “Huh,” he murmured, tipping the bottle to his lips. “I could get used to this.”

  All of it.

  Well, except the fucked-up hip. Nobody would want that.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  As soon as Trigrian had set the flyer down in front of the meet-shop the next day and triggered the right-side door up, Sera moved toward the opening.

  Ara let out a sultry laugh. “What’s the hurry?” she asked in Jekhani. “You’re not going to get less wet by moving faster. In fact, you may even get wetter.”

  “I’ve got things to do today.”

  “Like what?” Trigrian, the traitor, asked. He tried not to pick sides in his sisters’ arguments, but every now and then, he couldn’t stop himself from interjecting. He’d been holding his tongue all morning, but had been rolling his eyes more than usual.

  Sera nudged Elken down onto the path and scowled at her brother. “Well, for one thing, I need to feed Ais’s dog.”

  “And?”

  “And Dorro is going to give Elken an exam tonight, and I must be home before he arrives, obviously.”

  Ara gave her sister a quelling look. “I already knew about that. I made the appointment, remember?”

  “Then you should understand the urgency.”

  “What urgency? We have plenty of time.” Ara stepped out beside Elken, watched the flyer door swivel down, and then hitched the child onto her hip.

  “I’ll take her,” Trigrian said, scooping Elken out of her arms. “I’m so used to holding one now that I don’t know what to do with myself when I’m not.”

  “Tell Courtney to give you another one, then. A girl, next time. She makes pretty girls.”

  “I did, and, yes, she does. But she muttered something about ‘getting in line.’” He furrowed her brow. “I think Murk got to her first.”

  Sera giggled and rubbed some clinging leaf matter off the sweater she’d borrowed from Eileen. Asking for a sweater had only been a pretense. She’d really wanted to ask Eileen about Edgar, and Eileen had seen straight through her. Sera would have to be nosy some other way. “I think they were quibbling about that last week,” Sera said.

  “And you didn’t think to tell me?” Trigiran asked.

  She shrugged her good shoulder. “Well, they sounded to me like they were merely teasing each other. I can never tell when they’re being entirely serious.”

  Trigrian folded his arms over his chest and ground his teeth.

  “What?” Sera asked, blinking with as much contrived innocence as she could muster.

  “You’ve got to be my eyes and ears when you’re around those two. They selectively forget to tell me things.”

  “Bah.” Ara waved a dismissive hand at him. “They don’t want you to worry. That’s obvious, even to me. You picked your lovers well.”

  Trigrian let out a long breath and stepped onto the walkway. “I don’t think I had anything to do with the picking. They selected me.”

  “Even so. You didn’t say no, did you?”

  He scoffed sardonically. “Of course not. I’m not daft.

  Ara grinned sardonically. “So, congratulations!”

  Trigrian muttered something incomprehensible under his breath that was loud enough to make Elken laugh, and then disappeared into the meet-shop.

  Ara grabbed Sera’s good arm and tugged her along. “Come. I want to show you something.”

  “What? I’ve already seen where the coffee shop is going to go. What else is there?”

  “One of the defectors from Allan, Edgar, and Jasper’s old military unit is building a bar here.”

  “A what?”

  “A bar, Sera. Bar is an English word for a place where people gather to drink spirits and talk and flirt, I guess. The logistics aren’t entirely clear to me, but I was here a few days ago and there’s a machine called a jukebox that has all sorts of music inside.”

  “Ah.” Sera chuckled and tried to pick up her pace for her impatient sister. “I see the appeal now. Earth music?”

  “Yes. Of course, I’ve heard some that was in the directory of the household computer at the farm, but this collection has been curated by people with taste, apparently.”

  “I see.”

  “The building is down here on the corner. They wanted to build the place a bit far from the main street because they’ll stay open so much later than the other businesses and noise could disturb—”

  At the rumbling chorus of masculine laughter emanating from the open back door of Kent Taylor’s barn, the sisters stopped.

  “What’s happening in there this time of day?” Sera murmured.

  “Don’t know.” Brazenly curious as always, Ara nudged them off the sidewalk and toward the tidy path that led to the barn. The barn hadn’t been used for farm activity in at least a hundred years. Little Gitano had, in a way, sprang up around it, and the owners at the time had moved their farm activity farther out into the plain. Mostly, Kent used the barn to temporarily store the parcels he was tasked with delivering all over the province. Sera hadn’t ever seen him use the space for gatherings.

  The laughter boomed again, and the two women stepped off the path and hid in the shadow of the open door.

  Ara put her finger to her lips.

&nbs
p; Sera nodded and turned her right ear toward the conversation inside.

  “All right,” came Kent’s voice. “We knew nothing was going to happen with that one. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right? Anyhow, she’ll go back into the approach pool. Who else we got?”

  “Troya Lawson. You can have that bitch back, man.”

  Sera gave Ara a wide-eyed look. She didn’t like that word, “bitch.” The men who’d raped her had called her that so many times, and the word had never lost its cutting edge. It probably never would.

  Sera wasn’t close to Troya, but she knew the Terran woman well enough. Troya was a longtime resident of Little Gitano who’d traveled to Jekh as a child with her single mother. Her mother was meant to have been paired with a farmer from the colonial matchmaking database, but she’d chosen instead to flee into the countryside with the defectors after seeing that the man she was assigned to marry wasn’t what he was advertised to be.

  Troya was one of those women who always had a smile on her face and who was always first to greet someone. She wasn’t a “bitch,” and even if she were, she’d probably earned the right to be.

  With her finger pressed to her lips again, Ara shook her head.

  “Any notes for us?” Kent asked.

  “Yeah. I guess she doesn’t get the hots for Terran guys anymore, so y’all may as well stop barking up her tree unless you’ve got a red wang.”

  Ara gaped momentarily before muttering in Jekhani, “What is happening?”

  “Real cute,” Kent said. “I’m sure the Jekhan fellows in the room today won’t take too much offense, though. We’ll make the necessary notes in the log.”

  Sera gave Ara a poke.

  Ara put her finger up to her lips yet again. “Wait,” she whispered.

  “All right, who’s still left?” Ken asked. “Oh, Jamie. How about you? Anything to report on Valen?”

  Sera gripped Ara’s arm when she noticed her sister edging closer to the open door.

  “Why are they talking about Valen?” Sera whispered.

  “Couldn’t even get close,” a man—presumably Jamie—said. “I don’t think she leaves the farm much. I’ll try again for another cycle, so no changes on that one.”