by Megan Hart
Their love is a memory too dangerous to recall.
Life is not easy by the Sea of Sand. The remote outpost and its lighthouse were never meant to serve as a place for wounded soldiers to recover, but that’s what it has become. Teila has lived in the lighthouse for her entire life, and now she also takes care of the men and women who gave their sanity fighting the Wirthera’s hive mind.
Captain Kason Reed was willing to give his life for the Sheirran Defense Forces, but now he can’t remember anything except bits and pieces of the war. When his attraction to his caregiver, Teila, causes him to make advances toward her, she becomes the aggressor, urging him with her body to explore the memories of his past—memories that all seem to draw him back to Teila…
Those returned by the Wirthera never come back whole. Their bodies are flooded with nanobots designed to trigger homicidal rage when the soldiers remember what happened to them. No matter how much Teila wants her new patient to remember her and the life they shared, before, she can’t remind him.
If she does, he might kill them all.
By The Sea of Sand
A Futuristic Romance
Megan Hart
By the Sea of Sand
Megan Hart
Chaos Publishing
Copyright 2012, 2019 Megan Hart
Chaos Edition, License Notes
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This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
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ebook ISBN: 978-1-940078-92-2
print ISBN: 978-1-940078-93-9
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photo credit: VSanandhakrishna, 3quarks, RomoloTavani
cover: Chaos
Dedication
To my kids, because you’re the best thing I’ve ever done.
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And to my husband Robert, who makes every day a delight.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Epilogue
Passion Model
Also by Megan Hart
About the Author
Chapter 1
Life was not easy by the Sea of Sand.
Perhaps it was not meant to be, Teila thought as she shielded her eyes against the searing glare of the triple suns overhead. If life were easier here, more would’ve come to homestead Sheir, stripping the planet’s difficult-to-find resources faster than they could be replenished. It had happened in other places. It had made war.
Then again, she thought, there would always be reasons for war.
“Mao?” Beside her, Stephin tugged the sleeve of her robe. “Mao, I’m hungry.”
Teila stroked her fingers through the length of her son’s tangled blond curls, whipped by the heated wind and useless to comb. “What do you want, sweetheart?”
The little boy jumped and clapped. “Milka! Milka!”
Laughing, Teila scooped him up. She pressed her face into the warmth of his skin, relishing the boy’s unique scent—milka, soap from his recent bath, a hint of her own perfume and, of course, the everpresent sand.
“Let’s see what we can find for you in the kitchen. Come.”
But before she turned from the railing of the balcony overlooking the sea, Stephin cried out, pointing. A whale calf had breached the sands, its burnished red and orange segments glistening with the oils that protected its skin from the constant grinding of sand against it, and also what made it so valuable to whalers. The calf rolled its immense tubular body over and over, exposing first its belly, then its back, to the suns’ heat and light that fed it.
If there was a calf, there was a mother nearby. Sure enough, in a moment the female also breached the surface. She was twice the size of her baby, her segments a deeper, duller red. Feelers topped with sensory organs vibrated, sensing the air for disturbances that would indicate a whaler or other dangers, but the sea was clear as far as Teila could see.
She and Stephin watched the whales for a minute or so as the giant creatures rose and fell beneath the sea’s gritty, evershifting surface. As the mother rolled, her segments ground against one another, whipping her oily coating into pellets that migrated outward along the edges of her scales.
“Oh, look, Stephin. Maybe we’ll get some fresh milka.”
As they watched, several of the pellets, each easily the size of Teila’s entire body, worked their way free of the mother whale’s skin. Denser than the sand, the milka pellets would remain on the surface of the sea even as the whales themselves, fully fed from the sunslight, disappeared below. With no whalers or milkasloops in sight, the pellets would likely drift for days or weeks until someone discovered them or they eventually were ground to dust by the constantly grinding sands.
Teila didn’t have a milkasloop, only a small scudder, but she was well skilled in the use of it and had all the tools to gather milka—at least for their personal use. She didn’t have the room to store more than one pellet at a time, nor the licensing to sell it. It was, in fact, illegal (if overlooked by most of the local authorities) for her to gather it herself instead of reporting it. But there was nothing better than fresh milka.
Leaving Stephin in the capable hands of his amira, Densi, Teila quickly shucked her robe, leaving her in a sleeveless undershirt and leggings, and wrapped her hair and face in a scarf. Grabbing the long milka hook and some rope, she went down the long spiral stairs into the base of the lighthouse, then to the boathouse and the dock beyond it. Tilting the solar panels, she urged the scudder away from the dock and toward the smallest pellet.
She’d marked the location of it from the lighthouse balcony, but of course the swelling waves had shifted it. The first pellet she came across was too big—twice the size of the scudder. Teila shifted the solars to urge the scudder a little farther from the lighthouse, skimming it along the undulating sands. The winds fluttered the edges of her scarf, and she wished she’d taken the time to slip on a pair of goggles.
The pellet she’d been aiming for came into view. It was still easily as big as her boat, but when she hooked it and tied it behind, there was no trouble pulling it. The pellet’s smooth surface skidded without friction on top of the sands, tugging a little at the scudder’s back end as she steered it toward the lighthouse.
She could’ve stayed out here forever, or at least much longer. As a girl she’d spent hours on the sea in this boat and an equal number on her father’s much larger whalecraft. It had been years since she’d been brave enough to leap onto a breaching whale in order to scrape free the smallest and freshest pellets, the most coveted. But once she’d been one of the best milka harvesters.
Nobody bothered to do it that
way anymore. Now the whalers came with their nets, capturing the whales and holding them above the surface while the mechanical harvesters crawled all over the creatures and scraped them raw. Then they left the poor things behind without so much as a lic of oil to coat their skins against the sea’s rough caress. Many of them died.
By the time she got back to the shore, Billis and Vikus had come to greet her, their curved knives at the ready. They made short work of the pellet, slicing it into thick slabs for storage, then smaller pieces for immediate consumption.
“It’s a good one,” Vikus said, showing her the smooth white coating and the layers of red and orange inside. The center was soft and pink and sweet. “You could live the rest of your days on what you could earn from the sea.”
“I’ll live the rest of my days a free woman, thank you,” Teila said. “I don’t have the head to be a criminal.”
Vikus grinned. “Me and Billis . . .”
“Shh, I don’t want to know.” Teila waved her hands. She’d known these men since they were boys, which seemed like only yesterday. It made her feel old when she realized both of them had been of legal age for as long as Stephin had been alive.
They’d been good boys, and they were good men. Life out here could be rough, and Teila had needed to rely on Billis and Vikus for a lot. She watched them take care of the pellet, snagging a bite for herself, relishing the sweetness as it melted on her tongue. She tipped her face to the suns’ heat, savoring that as well in the last few hours before sunsdown and the world turned to ice.
With her eyes closed against the glare, Teila thought the steady thump-thump was the rising wind. But when the sound got louder, she looked to see a large cruiser lowering itself onto the patch of rocky earth behind the lighthouse. The bits of scrub grass there had been burnt so many times by landing cruisers that there was little left to ignite, but the rocks glowed red from the heat of the thrusters.
“I have no room,” were the first words out of her mouth when the man in the familiar uniform came down the short ramp toward where she stood waiting. “You’ve given me too many as it is. This is still a lighthouse, not a convalescent home. Or an asylum.”
“Those convalescents,” the soldier said, “are what keep that roof over your head and food in your stomach. Nobody comes this far in this direction any more. What use is a lighthouse without those who’d need guiding?”
He was wrong about that, but there was no use arguing with him. “There is always need for a light in the dark,” Teila said.
The man studied her. He wore a scar over his eye like a badge, and in a way she supposed that was exactly what it was. His dark gray hair had been cropped short to his head, not because of his rank or service in the Sheirran Defense Forces, but because, she suspected, he liked the way it made him look. The Rav Aluf was the highest-ranking commander in the SDF. He was also her father-in-law.
“Bring him,” he said over his shoulder to the two soldiers manipulating the gurney on which a covered figure rested. “Take him inside. There’s a room at the top, put him in there.”
“I think I should decide where to put him,” Teila said mildly. “Seeing as how he’s going to be my charge.”
The Rav Aluf raised a hand, effectively stopping the soldiers halfway down the ramp. He twitched back the magblanket covering the man beneath to show his ravaged face. Starburns feathered over his forehead and cheeks. His mouth and eyes were swollen and the blisters scabbed over.
Teila drew in a breath, though she’d seen soldiers in far worse condition come to her. She looked at the Rav Aluf. He jerked the blanket with its healing magnetic properties back over the man’s face.
“Put him in the top room,” Teila told the attendants. “Make him as comfortable as possible.”
Chapter 2
Darkness.
It was better than the light had been, the unending, burning glare he’d thought would be the last he’d ever see. There’d been a period of time when he’d wished for it, the end of everything. Now, with the pain in his face and limbs eased by time and whatever the medibots had done to him, he lay in the dark and wished for something to ease the monotony.
How long had he been here? Not a clue. He remembered the battle in which he’d fallen, his ship attacked by a swarm of the small, stinging ships they called hornets. The advanced fleet for the much larger ships of the Wirthera. Hornets normally would’ve been no match for a full-sized Sheirran battlecruiser, except for the damage they’d taken on in the solar storm just hours earlier. The ship’s hull had been breached by the myriad of hornet lasers and their scuttling robotic destroyers that ripped and tore at metal like it was made of paper.
He remembered all of that. The smells of fire and screams of dying men. The whine of the ship’s engines as they struggled to provide enough power to keep it running when the repair systems kicked in. He remembered the agony of the shields going down, letting in the flares of starfire that burned on contact. And he remembered the metal pincers and claws all over him, the slice of his skin, the burn of the injections. He remembered so much pain.
But he couldn’t remember his name.
Chapter 3
Teila had never trained as a medicus. She’d learned how to stitch wounds and mix herbs as remedies in the lighthouse because here in Apheera, the furthest outpost on the edge of the Sea of Sand, there was no city. Not even a town. The closest medica was a half-day’s journey away across the sea on one of the islands, where they’d built waystations for the whalers and tradeships. Teila could soothe a fever and bandage a wound, but the greater injuries done to most of the men and women who’d found their way here to her care were not of the flesh but the mind, and for those, she was still learning.
The man in the top room, the one closest to the glass dome containing the solar-powered lamp, had been sleeping for days. That was from the drugs they’d pumped through his veins on the medicruiser, and also the nanobots still working to repair all the internal damage. When they’d finished their duties, they’d flush out from his system in his waste, but until then they’d work at keeping him mostly unconscious. She’d made sure the room was kept dark for him, the temperature comfortable, that his bandages were clean. Beyond that, all she could do was wait for him to wake up.
“You understand,” the Rav Aluf had said, “how important it is that his mind be taken care of. The traumas he suffered, the damage done to those neural pathways that hold his memories, his personality, all of that was done by nanotriggers implanted in him by the Wirthera. You know what will happen to him if they’re triggered.”
All Sheirran schoolchildren had heard the horror stories. “He will become part of their hive.”
“He will be lost to us.” The Rav Aluf had shaken his head sharply before straightening his shoulders. “He will become the enemy. He will have to be put down, but before he can he might do a lot of damage.”
As a top-ranking soldier in the SDF, the man in the top room had been fitted with internal and external enhancements that made him a better warrior. Injuries incurred during battle would’ve resulted in additional enhancements, not all of which she’d ever discover even with full access to his medical records—which she didn’t have. If he went rogue, if he were triggered to join the Wirtheran hive, the enhancements that made him such a good soldier also meant that he could easily become a machine, destroying everything in its path in order to create the chaos the Wirthera promoted as part of their plan to take over Sheira and all the other worlds they’d yet to conquer.
“I understand,” Tiela had said.
The Rav Aluf had leaned closer. “Do you? Do you understand how important it is that he return to himself without prompting?”
“Yes,” she’d said, irritated by the man’s condescension. It wasn’t new, so she ought to be used to it. But it still stung.
“And that he may never?”
This had been harder to answer, but she’d managed. “Yes, Rav Aluf. I understand. You’ve brought me a man I’m supposed to h
eal but I’m not allowed to help.”
A smile had twitched his lips, and she’d seen a shadow of the man he must’ve been when much, much younger. “You were ever so much smarter than I could give you credit for.”
With that, he’d turned on the heel of his polished boots that had always thudded too loudly on her tiled floors. He’d left her there with this man who could be so dangerous if she wasn’t careful. And why? Because, she thought as she moved around the darkened room, straightening and tidying, listening to the sound of his uneven breathing, the Rav Aluf trusted her.
His name was not Jodah, but that was what the Rav Aluf had told her to call him. It was the most common birthname on Sheira, though not many kept it beyond their adolescence when the adulthood rituals allowed children to choose what they wanted to be called for the rest of their lives. It suited him, she thought as she dipped a cloth in cool water and dabbed at the crust surrounding the edges of one of the bandages on his forehead.
When his hand came up and grabbed her wrist hard enough to grind the bones, Teila bit back the cry that would’ve had Vikus or Billis running to help her. They wouldn’t take kindly to seeing her charge handling her so roughly—but Teila hadn’t grown up surrounded by her father’s less-than-savory friends for nothing.
