by F. E. Arliss
Orbit Guard Issued
Book 1 in the Orbit Guard Romance Series
F.E. Arliss
Many thanks for the support of my husband Andrew and the hard work that allowed all this writing to happen.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1) Drudgery
2) The Colonel
3) Booted in the Backside
4) Seriously?
5) So Long Misery
6) Chance Chooses
7) Assigned Fiance
8) Launched
9) Port-a-John Challenges
10) Settling
11) Standard Time
12) Attack
13) Reassurance and Romance
14) To Be or Not To Be
15) Conscripted
16) Prep
17) Launched Forward
18) Traitors
19) Mole
20) Whys and Wherefores
21) Issued
This is a work of fiction. The story and characters portrayed here are not based, or intended to be based, on any actual person, place, time or event.
Chapter 1
Drudgery
Chloe Sedgewick breathed in the soft early morning air of central Missouri. She enjoyed this time of day more and more each passing month. The air was still cool and smelled of the blooming flowers that surrounded her rented cottage in a haphazard border. Her small bungalow sat in a riot of bushes and flowers that tangled in a constant state of vibrant color. Roses and lilac bushes anchored the corners and daisies, day lilies, iris, sedum, and other perennials meandered around the base of the cottage in a quilt of scent and texture. It was the only time of day, besides later evening, when she could truly say that her time was her own. It was a gift to savor these few minutes each morning before the hassles of daily life rolled over her in a wave of needy people and endless chores.
In the evening, when it cooled off a bit, she’d put Seven dust on the roses in order to repel the Japanese beetles that tried to invade every bloom. Then she’d pull weeds from the garden beds until the swarms of mosquitoes and chiggers drove her inside.
Chloe was the youngest in a family of six children, the acknowledged beauty, with her long honey-blond hair, fair skin and blue eyes shining out from a sculptured face with high cheekbones and small chin. For some reason, almost all of the work of carrying out the daily needs of her fragile mother had fallen into her lap. It wasn’t so much by choice that Chloe did these endless tasks, but more out of necessity. Her mother, Selma, had been a school teacher, though Chloe often wondered how Selma had ever managed that, as she seemed too childlike to have ever been a responsible adult, let alone an example to impressionable teens.
Their father had run off and abandoned Selma when she was pregnant with Chloe. Many didn’t see how he’d managed to stick around for the first three pregnancies that had produced one son and two sets of twins. But the fourth pregnancy seemed to have been the magic number that finally spooked him. Gossip said that after leaving them, he’d had a fall when painting a one-hundred, foot tall flagpole and ended up in Mayo clinic in Minnesota. Then he’d wooed his nun of a nurse and married her. Good riddance to bad blood, or so Chloe thought. It was, frankly, all too kooky sounding to have been real in Chloe’s book, but sadly, every word was.
Most of her other siblings were either far away and unable to help care for their aging mother, or too limited by their own burdens, real or imagined,to help. Every family Chloe knew seemed to have at least one or two children who were either off in la la land, prison, or just walking around somewhere drinking, smoking and doing nothing. There was always a proverbial black sheep. Though Chloe had come to realize that being the ‘little darling’ of a family wasn’t always a cakewalk either.
Seth, Chloe’s oldest brother lived in South Carolina and while a successful grocery store owner, he had his own burdens with staffing and stocking at the store, a socializing, ladder climbing wife, and three bratty children to corrall. It was his small cottage that she lived in and rented, now.
After Seth, came the twins, Alex and Annie, fraternal twins, one boy and one girl, respectively. Both were crazy adventurous and had gone off to Australia to spend a couple of years as white-water rafting guides. When that opportunity had ended they had branched out and learned diving and were now working on tourist diving boats that took wealthy tourists out to the Great Barrier Reef. They simply didn’t have any interest in anything but themselves. When they were together, that was enough. Nothing else really mattered. Certainly not the stodgy every day burdens of a family business, or an eccentric mother and two equally eccentric younger sisters.
Then there came the next set of twins, Gervais and Delilah. Chloe often wandered if her mother knew that Gervais was really a man’s name. No one in this tiny backwater town seemed aware, or maybe they just didn’t care. It certainly went along with the broken-down nature of the area. Gervais and Delilah seemed to suffer from the same malaise as their mother. Sometimes they were able to carry on and get jobs, and do well for a while, but then after a year or two, they just fell apart and had to come home again. So, in the end, Chloe had three grown adults who needed quite a bit of guidance.
Then there was her, Chloe, the youngest, the prettiest. Everyone thought she should marry the local football jock, but Chloe went off to college and had often joked to her friends that if she’d stayed in Missouri and married the high school football star that they’d all wanted her to marry, she’d be an overweight fishwife with a voice that shattered glass. There were days now that she felt that situation wasn’t too far in the future.
Guiding Selma, Gervais and Delilah, which was about like trying to move leaping frogs in a wheelbarrow, and running the family business, an apartment block in an even more rundown town down the road, kept Chloe laboring at her wit’s end most days. Originally, Chloe had returned for a temporary stay to help her mother after a series of small strokes. Gervais and Delilah were on one of their good streaks then, and Chloe had been working in a clinic as a psychotherapist after having gotten her Master’s Degree at Vanderbilt University. She’d been happy. A wel- respected counselor with her own townhouse, friends and colleagues in an upscale area of Nashville. When Selma had been forced to retire after she had what basically boiled down to a psychotic episode, or in euphemistic terms, ‘a bit of a nervous breakdown from overwork’, as Chloe would later describe it to the people who were rude enough to ask; which happened to be just about everyone in their redneck backwater of a town, Chloe had taken a sabbatical and come back to rural Missouri to help her mother. Now if felt like she might be the one heading for that ‘bit of a nervous breakdown from overwork’. The irony was not lost on her.
Chloe, in her own mind, referred to Missouri as ‘misery’, and often wondered why in the hell she stayed here. She stayed because she’d believed that they needed her, but it didn’t change the fact that she was slowly getting whittled down to nothingness under the burden of their care. Nor, that no matter how much she did for them, it was never enough. They were just the type of people that believed the Universe owed them something, and that ‘something’ seemed to be her slave labor.
At her grandmother’s urging, she’d left and gone to college far away in order to escape the stifling judgement of this tiny town. Her gran had been the only person who really seemed to have loved Chloe unconditionally. Gran was gone now, much to Chloe’s dismay. Selma, Chloe’s mom, really cared more about whether Chloe looked good, was skinny enough, and was doing interesting things, so that she could brag about her to her friends and try to marry her off to some local rich slob. Now, having come back as an adult, she’d thought she could cope with the constricted environment, but gradually the lack of any food that wasn’t fried, music that was all cou
ntry and western, and the lack of any type of cultural beauty, had worn her down. It felt as though she was just circling the toilet bowl before being swirled down to sewage.
The question was, what to do about it. If she stayed here, the future really did not look bright. She was wasting her best years on an ungrateful family and a century old apartment building that was deteriorating at an ever-increasing pace. They were making less and less money on the building, and just struggling to keep their heads above water. If she left, her mother would be taken care of with minimum basic care. Her school retirement was enough to cover her costs at the assisted living facility she resided in. Selma wouldn’t thrive, but she wouldn’t die either. On the other hand, she never really seemed that focused on how much Chloe did for her anyway, and Chloe had a sneaking suspicion that Selma would just find someone else to do her work.
The twins, well who knew? They’d be on Social Security for the rest of their lives and since they didn’t really listen to anything she said anyway, they’d probably be fine. Not as organized and their affairs not in as good of order, but again, they wouldn’t die. Still, leaving them made her feel a guilty. On the other hand, staying here and being underappreciated, was beginning to really wear her down and piss her off.
Plus, she was never going to find a decent love interest around here. They were all either already married, grossly overweight, unmarried and completely without any redeeming qualities, or just plain too overwhelmed by her looks and competence to ever approach her. Oh, and then there was the lack of a general overall intelligence or interest in the world outside their tiny town. It was all ‘the outside’ and to be feared and avoided at all cost. Chloe really did not want to live the rest of her life like that. As a child, she’d dreamed of living amongst the stars, and anything had seemed possible. She knew she needed to regain that hope and spark about life. She just wasn’t sure she knew how. To be honest, she was completely fed up and wanted to go somewhere where she would be appreciated for her brains and it would be nice to be part of a team, not this one-woman driver on the bus to Crazy Town, Misery.
Chapter 2
The Colonel
Leo Reinegaard was feeling something that he rarely felt. He was anxious. Though none of that showed on his face to the other officers near him. His stoic, scarred countenance remained as emotionless and calm as always. Ever since his airborne troop, the Orbit Guard elite troop Dragon Guard, had won a victory on the dark side of Pluto several months ago, he’d been contemplating what to do about his new status as Colonel Reinegaard, Forward Commander of Orbit Guard’s frontier sector. The war would be never ending as far as Leo knew. The Arachnians, an alien species that actually looked like hard-shelled, upright spiders, needed food. They’d eaten everything on several planets and were trying to find alternative food sources. Tasty human snacks seemed very tempting to them and since there were a lot of humans, Earth seemed a highly prized target.
Leo had joined Orbit Guard when he was eighteen years old in order to escape the desolate Danish fishing community where his drunken, boat mechanic father and screeching banshee of a mother, eked out a paltry living. Life there had been hell for him. He’d been injured in a boat engine blast helping his father when he was eleven. His mother had screamed and sobbed seeing him in the hospital after his bandages had been removed. In truth, the engine blew because his father hadn’t really been paying attention to the job, only the call of the bottle in his lunch box.
After that, it didn’t matter how hard he worked to help his father or his mother, or to win athletic games at school or to get good grades, it never helped. His parents only saw a monster where their handsome boy used to be, and his classmates were afraid of him no matter how many years passed. The twisted burns that ridged his face on the left side, turned white as the redness faded. Still, nothing changed. And no matter how many times a day he rubbed the burn cream the doctors gave him into his face, neck and shoulder, the ridges never lessened. Strangely, as painful as the burns had been for the first several years, over time the pain lessened. The pain from being ostracized had been far greater.
The day after he’d graduated high school on a typical dark, gloomy Danish afternoon, he’d taken the E800 he’d saved from working at the recycling plant after school and boarded a ferry for The Netherlands. From there he’d taken a train to Paris where he’d enrolled in the Orbit Guard. Even there, where all soldiers were meant to be equal, they’d taken one look at his face and sent him to the front line. Over the years of hard fighting and spartan living, Leo had earned the respect his face never gave him. He’d developed a reputation for ferocity and fearlessness in front of enemy fire that earned him award after award and had given him opportunities to further his training and educational status. After a decade of fighting on the frontier he’d accumulated enough battle credits to attend Orbit Guard War College, the officer training academy.
When it became clear to the instructors at the War College that he had brains to go with the bravery and ferocity, he was entered into Officer Candidacy and went on to pass all the exams with flying colors. At the end of War College, he was a Full Lieutenant. After a decade back on the frontier fighting renegades and the first alien intruders, the Arachnia, he was now a Colonel at the ripe old age of 42. Most officers on the frontier station he commanded now, were dead long before they hit forty. So, for the frontier, he really was an old man.
He’d been called to Headquarters for a meeting that they’d been reluctant to disclose the content of. It was that unknown that was currently eating at him and he figured the sooner he found out what the upper echelon brass wanted, the better.
Chapter 3
Booted in the Backside
Chloe swallowed a gulp of water, wiped the sweat off her forehead with a bandana she had draped over her shoulder, and surveyed the latest repair on the apartment complex owned by her mother, Selma. It looked good. The weathered brick had just looked worn and impoverished when she’d first arrived back, but now the addition of awnings, black shutters, Victorian style apartment number plaques and a new wrought iron and plexi-glass portico over the front door, really made the building look charming instead of just tired. The units were full for now, so she had that worry off her shoulders. Though she suspected that the recommendation note she’d written for one of tenants in 2B about their regular payments as a tenant was probably a prelude to a notice of vacancy, as they were probably giving it to a new landlord as a reference. Oh well, that was the housing industry!
She’d mentioned that the apartment 2B might be coming up with a vacancy notice two nights ago at dinner with her mother and the twins, Gervais and Delilah. 2B actually had the nicest fittings and biggest footprint of any apartment in the building and was in need of new windows. So, having it vacant for a few weeks wouldn’t be all bad. Chloe would have the opportunity to update those windows and perhaps raise the rent a good bit. A silver lining she’d supposed.
That silver lining had been wiped from her mind when Gervais and Delilah had mentioned that perhaps they’d like to move in to that unit. When Chloe had mentioned that she was going to be raising the rent on the unit after the new windows were installed and perhaps it would be more than they wanted to pay on their disability. There had been a conspicuous silence from her mother and both twins. She wasn’t sure what that meant, but it couldn’t be good. They probably weren’t wanting to pay the higher rent. Which did not bode well for the finances of covering the improvements.
Just then, speak of the devils, Selma and the twins pulled up in her mother’s new Cadillac sedan and onto the gravel lot adjoining the building. She’d just finished spraying the parking lot for weeds, so Chloe waved them forward toward the side of the building, not wanting them to step out into the chemicals she’d sprayed.
As they got out of the car, Gervais snapped at her, “You don’t have to tell us how to park, you know,” Chloe sighed. “I wasn’t telling you how to park, Gervais. I’ve just finished spraying Roundup on the weeds in the
parking area and didn’t want you to have to step in it. That’s all.” Gervais didn’t look terribly chastised, but muttered, “Oh, ok, fine!”
“What brings you guys down to the building?” Chloe asked. Her mother looked at her, raised a faded brow and said, “Well the twins did tell you that they wanted 2B if it came available, didn’t they?”
“I know they’d mentioned it, but since the rent is going to go up, as I mentioned, I didn’t know if they thought they could afford that on their disability,” Chloe said in a low voice. “You don’t have to talk about us like we’re not here,” snapped Delilah. “And we aren’t going to pay the higher rent. We’re not paying rent at all. Mother says we can live here without paying any rent,” Delilah added.
Chloe looked at her Mother. “You know this is the highest grossing unit, right?” she asked Selma. “Yes, I know,” stated Selma. “But the girls need someplace to live, and I’ve got this place, right? We might as well get some good out of it. And, really, they should have the nicest unit, we’re the owners!”
