Hand of Raziel (Daughter of Mars Book 1)

by Matthew S. Cox

  Pavo looked up in mid-slurp, face hovering over the bowl in the midst of a steam plume. “Mrff awful.”

  Risa rambled out a brief recollection of her conversation with the girl, picking at her soup. Despite the mood kicking her appetite in the proverbial jubblies, the noodles were good enough to tempt. “She didn’t want me to be her mother, because she thought I’d die. The way she looked at me… I felt like the evil bitch everyone thinks I am. Have I killed anyone’s parents? Have I ever made a child look at someone with those eyes?”

  “If there was a friendly way to wage war, I think humanity would’ve figured it out by now. They’ve certainly had enough practice.” Pavo ceased eating and pushed gossamer strands of vegetable around the bowl with the chopsticks. “I’ve seen worse things on duty than you’d think. A kid losing a soldier parent’s bad enough, but try telling a nine-year-old boy his own father tried to sell him to buy drugs. Or walk in on a street gang amusing themselves by seeing how close they can get to shooting a wall without hitting kidnap victims in the head… and betting on who shits their pants first, older brother or little sister.”

  She lost her appetite. “I…”

  “Sorry.” He scooped a mass of noodles into his mouth, slurping.

  “Could you walk away from the Front?”

  She poked a chopstick at a shrimp, making it bob in the broth while he mumbled and made noises as if asking her to let him finish chewing.

  “You’re serious?”

  “I can’t do this anymore, Pavo.” She looked up, into his eyes. His real eyes. A ripple of shame came over her at how artificial it made her feel. “The killing… the not knowing if I’m going to live to see two hours into the future. That girl…”

  “A child’s a bit of a leap for you, isn’t it? Maybe you should start with a cat first.”

  In the span of six-tenths of a second, Risa decided she wanted her soup enough not to hurl it at him, and instead opted to throw the briefs at his head.

  “A cat? Really?”

  “Is the girl at least litterbox trained?”

  She looked around for something heavier to throw.

  “Laugh… they’re called jokes.”

  Risa slouched in her seat. “This isn’t funny. I don’t want her to grow up and turn into whatever the hell I am. I don’t want to kill anymore. I’m tired of all the fighting and the death. Even if we win, we’ll just have another corrupt government. The names will change, but nothing else will. Who knows, we might even make it worse.”

  “You’re taking the truth about your old man a bit hard. You used to despise the UCF for what they did. You used to believe in the cause, freedom for the people.”

  She grasped at the air. “I just want…”

  Pavo edged out of his seat and moved to her side.

  “A family,” she whispered, as he pulled her into an embrace. “I have this silly little dream of the three of us having a normal life.”

  He kissed her for a long moment, and gazed upon her face once they pulled apart. “There’s nothing silly about dreams.”

  Risa rested her head on Pavo’s shoulder. “Where do you want to go?”

  “I’ll support the PVM until it’s no longer necessary, or I’m in the ground. Mars is not Earth. We have a right to govern ourselves.”

  “But…” she shivered.

  He lifted her face with a hand on each cheek until their lips met in a lingering embrace. She threaded her fingers together behind his neck. For minutes, they kissed in silence. His hands slid around behind her, drawing her tight against him. She moaned into his mouth, squirming. When their eyes met, Pavo leaned up before his desire ran away with her body.

  “I might consider avoiding field ops, but I’ll always be willing to go if called.” He panted. “Are you sure this is what you want?

  She lowered her gaze to his chest, her hands sliding to his shoulders. “I want Mars to be free, but there’s got to be a better way than blowing people up.” Risa turned away so he couldn’t see the tears welling in her eyes. “The way she looked at me… how many―”

  He embraced her from behind, brushing his days-old beard against her cheek. “They send you after military targets.”

  “Yes.” She wiped her face. “Soldiers, even theirs, have families. Every time we make an orphan, we create another fanatic who wants nothing more than to destroy us.”

  “This war can’t last forever.” He brushed her hair aside with two fingers. “On Earth, there are resistance cells all throughout ACC territory. Their commoners have a bleak life, far worse than we do here. The seeds of discontent are planted, they only need water.”

  Risa frowned. “That’s fine for down there.”

  “We send banned vids of the warfare on Mars to Earth. If enough people in the UCF get riled up and the government gets involved, the corporates won’t want to fight two battles.”

  She blinked, letting her arms drop to her sides. “They want to start a shooting war on Earth too?”

  Pavo sat on the edge of the Comforgel pad. “No, just get the situation to the point where it may be likely. Not even the ACC is reckless enough to pull the trigger over there. Too much tech, too dense. All it would take would be one EMP and they’d have to resort to nukes.”

  “I…” She looked down.

  “Cheap. Despite their military uniforms, the ACC is still run like a corporation. All of their hardware is made by the lowest bidder or the cheapest manufacturer from parts imported from wherever they cost the least. The only reason they stopped offshoring jobs to third-world countries is they can pay their own citizens less. Sure their infrastructure is homed on protected central cores, but by the time they replaced the fried periphery systems and re-uploaded everything, conventional warfare would encroach too far. They’d prefer no Earth at all to their losing it.”

  “That sounds so insane. What good is having all the money and power if there’s no one left alive to rule?” She sat in his lap, hands folded in her own. “I want to stop killing. I don’t want to be a monster anymore.”

  He kissed her on the lips, a peck that ended too fast. “You are not, nor ever were, a monster.” His words brushed hot breath across the side of her neck, making her shudder.

  “Whenever I kill people, I have awful dreams. I always see the fire. It’s getting worse. Now it comes into the vent after me, a clawing hand made of flames.” I’ve been serving Raziel. What if the other side is coming after me?

  Pavo put one arm around her. “Is it the people of Mars you fight for, or was it all just anger over what happened to your father? Sometimes, justice and revenge borrow each other’s clothes.”

  She opened her mouth, a sharp intake of breath, but stalled.

  He raised an eyebrow. “A bit of both?”

  Risa told Kree she always hid, but now wasn’t the time to keep doing it. “I hated the UCF… even more than the ACC. I fumed about how Maris sent us at them nine times for every UCF target we hit. Whenever we did go after a Coalition target, it was always half decrepit and basically abandoned already.” Like we’re just putting on a show.

  “The enemy of my enemy…” Pavo clasped her hands.

  “Garrison said the same thing. When the ACC is gone, he thinks we can effect change politically.”

  He kissed her earlobe, making her shiver before whispering, “War or not, I love you.”

  She pushed him over onto his back, straddling him. Ebon hair hung down past her face. Elation and sorrow sparred for prominence in her heart. She wanted to say it to him too. The words stalled at the back of her throat. Hearing that phrase in her voice would all but guarantee something bad. Risa stared at him, mute.

  Pavo caressed her cheek with one hand. “You look like you’re about to cry.”

  “I don’t want you to die.” I’ve got the logic of a six-year-old. She lowered herself and kissed him on the lips, the earlobe, and the neck. “It’s like if I tell you how I feel, one of us is going to die.” Is that what happened to me? “I don’t want anything
to happen to us.”

  “There is no limit to what the ACC will do to win. You were one of the best operatives the Front had while you took suicidal risks.”

  “I wasn’t suicidal.”

  “Not caring if you come back in one piece isn’t much different. Some of the things you agreed to do… How good do you think you’ll be if you operate with a rational mindset? If you’re careful and diligent, you’ll be unstoppable.”

  “Me, rational?” She shrugged out of her weapons harness and held it out to the side with two fingers for a few seconds before dropping it with a plastic clatter. “Since when has anyone considered me rational?”

  “You are… when you have a mind to be.” He opened his arms to the sides, letting her unbutton his shirt and peel it away. “I promise I won’t take any stupid chances if you do the same.”

  She spread her fingers over his chest, pushing the fabric aside and raking her nails down a coarse forest of black hair. He reached up to the top of her neck, grasping the fastener of her ballistic stealth suit, and pulling it open to her hip, freeing her chest. Pavo spent a moment drinking in the sight before him, and slipped his hand in and around her right breast, cradling it.

  “I’m going to talk to Garrison about getting some time to get my thoughts sorted.” Risa watched him fondle her for a while. She shrugged the armor off her shoulders and pulled her arms free. “Everyone already thinks I’m Cat-6.”

  “There might be ways you could help that don’t involve combat operations.”

  She leaned against him, his chest warm against hers, both of them naked from the waist up. She nibbled at his ear while his hands explored her back.

  When he reached for his belt, Risa grabbed his hand. “I have this crazy idea. I want us to be together, Pavo. Normal. A family.”

  “Kree?” he asked, flashing a lazy grin.

  Her effort to get the buckle open stalled at the memory of the girl’s terrified stare. “Yes. It’s not a problem for you―I mean…”

  “No.” He smiled. “It’s not a problem, but…”

  She looked up at him, lips parted.

  “Can we still make one of our own?”

  A thousand images flashed by in her mind. Am I still human enough to have a… baby? There’s so many orphans, is it fair to have one? She squeezed his hand. Maybe one. What would Garrison say? Am I ready for this?

  She bit her lip. “Maybe I should start with a cat.”

  Pavo thrust his hands into her open armor, attacking the skin above her hips. She twisted off him to the side, peals of laughter echoing off the walls as she rolled onto her stomach in a feeble effort to get away from tickling fingers. He sat astride her and bent forward to kiss the nape of her neck. She moaned, wriggling as he worked the armor over her hips and down her legs. The rubbery material bunched at the shin around her boots. She wriggled back onto the bed, raising her knees one at a time so she could undo the fasteners on the side of each boot. Pavo pulled them away, leaving her naked from head to toe.

  “Start with a cat?” He kissed her in the same spot, whispering, “That was my line.”

  Lacking patience, she swiped a single claw at his belt. His pants hit the floor. He froze in place.

  Her lips curled into a grin as she waved her fingers, and the single claw, at him. “What? Didn’t you say I’m good with these?” She winked. “I wouldn’t miss.”

  He exhaled, looking down at himself. “You are. There’s no blood.”

  “No blood.” Risa crawled to him and slid her hands up his thighs until her fingers slipped into his boxers. She grasped the material in two fists, and tore them away. “We haven’t even started yet.”

  shift in weight ushered Risa out of the realm of dreams. She opened the one eye not in direct contact with the pillow, staring over an off-white haze at an empty canister of synthetic white wine on the nightstand. A cool breeze on her back made her aware of her nakedness. She lay face down on the Comforgel bed, arms crossed under the pillow and one leg tucked under a sheet up to the thigh.

  Pavo leaned over her and kissed her on the cheek. “Good morning.”

  “Mmm.” She closed her eye and curled on her side. “What time is it?”

  “About ten till six. Pulling an early today.”

  “Do you have to?” She reached out to grab him.

  Pavo caught her hand before it got him by the groin, and pulled her up. She slid to the edge of the bed, closing her eyes as they kissed for a long moment.

  “I do.”

  His second kiss became a startled cry into her mouth as her cold hands caressed his cock. Surprise in his eyes became mischievous aggression. A hand on the shoulder pushed her flat on her back. He hovered in close, the coarseness of his four-day beard raked over the insides of her thighs, sending a paralytic wave up and down her body. Risa shivered as his tongue made contact. The mixture of scratchy and smooth between her legs drew squeaks and whimpers. She writhed, grabbing useless fingers through the sheets, working her legs back and forth in search of something to brace her feet against.

  Risa gasped and moaned for many beautiful minutes. The frequency and pitch of her squeaks grew until she thought she could take no more. He slid upward, kissing along her stomach to the front of her throat. She shuddered, unable to move as he climbed up onto the bed with her. His hands slid around her. Risa thought his strong grip would draw her into an embrace, but the next thing she knew, her cheek and breasts pressed into the warm Comforgel. On her knees with her arms back, Pavo held her by the wrists and pulled her into him. Risa’s face burned with the indignity of the pose, the sense of helplessness it conjured. She raked her fingers at the air like claws. She felt trapped by his powerful hands as well as her desire to surrender and leap from the cliff to which his tongue had led her.

  She cried out, clamping her teeth around the pillow out of a deep-seated need to avoid notice. Risa tugged at her arms, unsure if her struggle was a genuine attempt to get away or if she felt a thrill at being held down and taken. They rocked in unison for several minutes. The harder she tried to pull away, the closer Pavo pushed her to the edge of release. He went rigid and shuddered, a series of spasmodic convulsions wracked him. When it passed, he slowed and released her wrists. Risa brought her arms down in front of her and braced her hands in the squishy gel pad, trying to catch her breath. Pavo eased her over onto her back before lowering himself again. She wrapped her arms around him, holding on as he kept going in slow, gentle strokes. Beard scratched at her neck as he kissed her throat.

  Her world melted away, for a short, blissful eternity, the two of them were all that existed. She lowered her guard and let off a wild moan of release. Once the wave of ecstasy subsided, they rolled over and she climbed astride him.

  “You make me so crazy.” Pavo kissed her on the lips. “Was that too rough?”

  I don’t know. She stared into his eyes for a minute. “I’ve never felt like that before.”

  “If you didn’t like it―”

  She kissed him again. A thin strand of saliva linked their lips for a second before breaking. “Let me think?”

  She alternated kissing and cuddling for a few minutes before sitting up. An attempt at round two petered out. Neither had much strength left. Risa collapsed on top of him, as happy as she had ever been in her life, and too tired to move.

  “Are you late?”

  “Not yet.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “You woke up too early.”

  “Guilty.”

  He stroked her hair for a short while longer, kissed her on the lips, and rolled her over onto her back. Pavo lost a few minutes more teasing at her nipple with the tip of his tongue.

  “I should go.” He seemed intoxicated at the sight of her, offering a dazed smile.

  She whined at her breast, rolling onto her stomach to watch him head for the bathroom. “That was cruel.”

  The lack of autoshower noise snapped her out of a brief catnap. Pavo tugged his coat on a few steps away, smiling at her. Risa squin
ted at him. The bulky Defense Force armor made him look more muscular and intimidating. She grinned at the irony of a hunted ‘terrorist’ falling in love with a cop.

  Pavo approached and tugged the sheet over her. “Hope you’re here when I get home.”

  After another kiss, he went for the door. She snuggled into the pillow and closed her eyes.

  Falling in love with a cop.

  Risa sat up and bolted from the bed, catching him a second before he opened the apartment’s outer door. He looked worried by the sudden urgency in her eyes, but relaxed as she embraced him. She stepped back to arm’s length, stood on tiptoe, and kissed him on the lips.

  He regarded her with a mischievous smile. “You’re making it difficult for me to leave.”

  She stared at him, lip quivering, ashamed of her artificial eyes, doubting they could convey the depth of her feelings. The unexpected thought had let her subconscious speak the truth. How would he react if she said it? How would she feel if she didn’t?

  “What is it?” He took her hand. “Something wrong?”

  “Pavo…” She fought the urge to hide her face. “I want to be with you. I want you to be careful, I want us to―”

  He kissed her on the lips. “I’ll be careful.”

  She stood in silence for the span of three heartbeats. “I love you.”

  Seconds passed with no visible reaction on his face. Risa clutched his arm with both hands, bracing herself for the rapid backpedal she was certain would follow.

  “I…” She glanced down. “It’s fast. Too soon. I―”

  He cupped her cheek in one hand and pulled her chin up, staring into her eyes. “Fast isn’t always a problem. Especially in our line of work.” A relieved grin bared his teeth. “For a sec there, I thought you were going to hit me with bad news.”

  He’s still smiling. “No. I just never thought I’d…”

  “Find someone?”

  Risa chuckled, twisting and gazing over her shoulder at the simu-daylight filtering in through the slatted windows on the far wall. “No, I never thought I’d live long enough.