Erstwhile: A Sci-Fi Romance (The Jekh Saga Book 1) Read online

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  SUMMARY

  As an adamant opponent of Terran settlement on the planet Jekh, Owen McGarry made his family name synonymous with “traitor” on Earth. Lobbyists standing to profit from off-world colonization hinted that the Jekhans were preparing to declare war. Nearly twenty years after Owen’s supposed death, his granddaughter Courtney wants to learn the truth—even if she has to travel to the far-flung colony to do it.

  Court soon learns that not only was her grandfather right about the Jekhans, but that conditions on their world are far more hostile than she feared. Terran forces decimated the population of the resident human-alien hybrids, and the people who remain seem to be all out of fight. That is, except for the pair of men Court finds hiding in her basement

  Fugitives Murki and Trigrian see a future in Court. On a planet where so few women remain, she has the potential to be the mate the lovers need. And more, she could become the advocate for their people that her grandfather didn’t get the chance to be

  When the corrupt local government seeks to punish Court’s friends and family for her actions, she has no choice but to make a stand. If it takes a riot to make the people on Earth see that they were misled about Jekh, she’s more than willing to start one. After all, her reputation couldn’t possibly get any worse.

  CHAPTER ONE

  OCTOBER 2036, BOSTON

  Officer Courtney McGarry had read the off-world relocation manual before departure repeatedly. She knew that she shouldn’t hold her breath when the antimicrobial hydration compound was pumped into her stasis pod. In the same way that she was programmed to look both ways before crossing the street or to hold her breath before jumping into deep water, the admonition was impossible to forget. The directive had been given at the beginning and end of each of the ten pre-departure acclimation classes that, as a relocatee, she’d been obligated to attend.

  She got it. Really, she did.

  “Breathe normally and allow the beads to mold to your airways.”

  The edict blasted through the long-haul space shuttle’s seat-back speakers again and again, and she couldn’t tune the directive out if she tried. The volume was loud enough to rattle the shuttle windows and aggravated the nerves in her teeth.

  She ran her tongue across her tingling front teeth and, at the movement in her left periphery, she looked across the aisle at Officer Pete Leonardo who tried and failed to stuff his cap into the seat pocket. There was no pocket.

  Three times. Then a fourth.

  Court set her elbow on the armrest, propped her chin atop her fist, and watched the guy.

  He’d graduated thirty-eighth out of fifty law enforcement officers—LEOs—in their training squad. Court had been number four. Her diminutive height had prevented her from completing certain physical tasks with the speeds of her taller male peers, but she did finish. Many didn’t.

  Ranking didn’t matter anyway. The recruiters had said they’d take the top twenty officers, but in the end, they’d ended up taking them all.

  That was a red flag for Court. If the folks on planet Jekh were so desperate for law enforcement officers, conditions couldn’t have been as stable as the colonial government’s propaganda stated.

  Suspicious as she was, Court didn’t see where she had a choice. She had to go anyway. She needed to get away from Boston…from Earth. She needed a fresh start in a place where the name “McGarry” didn’t mean anything.

  “What’s wrong with this thing?” Pete muttered on his fifth try with the cap.

  She bobbed her eyebrows at him and smiled in her beats me way. She smiled that way a lot. Tacit acceptance was easier than telling a man he was wrong.

  He’d be able to see if he’d stop pretending he doesn’t need glasses.

  Pete had failed the vision check, but nepotism had its perks. His uncle, the test administrator, had pushed Pete through, telling him he could get surgical vision correction for free once he arrived in Jekh.

  “Does yours work?” he asked, squinting at her.

  Court sighed and dragged her tongue across her dry lips. The recycled air was hell on her skin. The sooner she got into stasis, the better. “That line is just a seam, Pete.”

  “Oh.” He furrowed his sunburned forehead and leaned in to run his fingers along the ridge for verification. “They ought to make it a pocket.”

  “I’m sure there’ll be a survey for you to fill out once we land on Jekh.”

  “Gonna complain about the flight time, too. Three fuckin’ AM, man! They couldn’t get us out on an afternoon flight? The only people up this time of day are hookers and street cleaners.”

  Yeah, he’d know about hookers.

  Court had it on good authority he’d worked in vice in his last precinct in New Jersey, and that he sampled the goods more than he made arrests for them.

  She rolled her eyes, but of course he couldn’t see the reaction. He couldn’t see shit.

  She settled lower in her seat. Uncomfortable. The seats had obviously been built for people of taller stature. Her feet barely touched the rest, and they would probably go numb from dangling soon. Fortunately, she only had to endure the discomfort for a couple of hours. Once the shuttle was out of Earth’s atmosphere, all of the passengers would be put into a gentle stasis, the literature said. Terrans didn’t completely understand the intricacies of the technology they’d stolen from the visitors from the planet Jekh, but they’d figured out how to fly their big ships and to get people from Point A to Point B intact and breathing…after a couple of failed efforts.

  The Cormorant could travel the six light years between Earth and the Jekh system in a little over six months. The ship wasn’t the fastest in the fleet, but it had the most passenger space.

  Fifty LEOs recruited from all over the English-speaking world were on that thing—a group that was ninety-eight percent male and one hundred percent hungry for opportunity.

  They were promised good money, but they would have to be. The ratio of men to women in Jekh was approximately the same as the balance on that shuttle. The settlement officials meant to correct that as soon the military and police force was stable. People kept telling Court that she was going to be a hot commodity. She dreaded her integration there—didn’t look forward to the harassment—but her choices were to either endure the aggravation on Jekh, stay in Boston and continue to be scorned and abused for the actions of the politically radical grandfather who’d
died when she was a child, or move to Montana with her brother Owen. She could escape there, of course, but after the Marquise Corporation devastated a huge part of the state with a chemical plant explosion that turned the landscape into a big rocky ice block two hundred miles in any direction, nobody wanted to live there. Even with global warming being what it was, the ground would probably need decades to thaw.

  Owen liked being inaccessible. Misanthrope that Court believed herself to be, his position was a bit too far out there, even for her.

  “Breathe normally and allow the beads to mold to your airways.”

  Court laughed and adjusted her suffocating harness. The reminders occurred every ninety seconds in between warnings that passengers shouldn’t have eaten or drunk anything in the past twenty-four hours. She’d had a little coffee before turning in her apartment keys at the leasing office, figuring it was no different than taking medicine. For her, coffee might as well have been medicine. Her sister Erin had always teased that Court wasn’t very nice before that first cup in the morning, and Court didn’t bother arguing with her because Erin wasn’t very nice in the morning, either.

  One of the shuttle attendants—a tall, graceful woman with cherry red hair and wearing way too damned much ivory foundation—leaned into Court’s open pod and gave the safety harness an experimental tug.

  “Remember,” she said blithely, “when the hydration compound fills the cabin you should breathe normally and not try to hold your breath.”

  “Right.” Court tightened her grip on the armrests. Eyes forward, she stretched her legs as far as she could and tapped the toes of her boots meditatively on the footrest. A few years ago, she might have lashed out at the attendant and made some sarcastic quip about having heard the message the first ninety-seven times. Maturity hadn’t cured her of that compulsion, but it had made her tongue slower to lash.

  She loosened her fingers one at a time and pushed a smile onto her face for the lingering attendant. She locked her gaze on the woman in the powder blue flight suit and nodded at her.

  “You must get tired of saying that.”

  The woman’s shoulders drooped slightly, and she muttered under her breath, “God, you have no idea.” She looked left to the front of the cabin where, through the clear enclosure, the captain was preparing for launch. Then she looked to the rear where her co-attendant aided one of Court’s peers.

  The attendant, whose kitschy star-shaped name badge read Amy, straightened Court’s already-straight harness straps and leaned in. “I make the run to Jekh once every fourteen months,” she whispered. “This is my fifth round-trip.”

  Amy moved on from Court’s harness buckle and fiddled with the air controls overhead before leaning in again. “I can count on two hands how many women have relocated in this first settlement phase. Sometimes the men come back, but the women never do.”

  “I hear they can’t,” Court said without moving her lips.

  The captain was making his way down the aisle, making little swishes onto his palm. Check marks on a ring-projected holoscreen, probably.

  Amy nodded curtly at her. Then she looked to the right, and after a moment bent in again. “Did they match you up with someone on the other end?”

  Court nodded, too, not seeing a good reason to withhold the information. Everyone asked—from the uninhibitedly nosy folks in her family, to her fellow relocating LEOs, to strangers on the street when they overheard she’d made the cut. Technically, Court could have said no to the matchmaking attempt, but the colonial bureaucrats claimed doing so was inadvisable. Being paired off at the first available opportunity was a part of her contract, and agreeing to a match was probably the only reason they hadn’t rejected her academy application outright. The last thing she wanted was to be saddled with some stranger she couldn’t get rid of six light years from home, but she had to be a team player.

  At least for a while.

  Court had her own agenda in going to Jekh. Yes, she wanted escape, but also, she wanted to learn for herself the truth about her grandfather’s death. The McGarrys were a skeptical bunch, and none of them believed the story the US government fed them. They claimed would-be insurgents from Jekh assassinated him, along with many other “traitors” to the nation.

  The McGarrys didn’t buy the story. They’d found it amusing that all the people who’d disappeared were ones who’d been sympathetic to the Jekhans—people who didn’t believe they’d intended to invade Earth. Her grandfather and his fellows believed them when they said all they wanted was to open trade and to share. They’d claimed they had common ancestry with humans, but the government said that was a lie.

  Court needed to know the truth, and there had to be someone on Jekh who’d give it to her.

  “Maybe your match will be okay,” Amy murmured after a maintenance worker squeezed past her in the aisle, but Court didn’t buy that, either. All the cheer had leached from Amy’s voice.

  “If he’s not, I can say no, right?” Court asked. “Matches should be ladies’ choice given the supply and demand issue.”

  “Doesn’t work that way there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The other attendant, a woman about twice Amy’s age, stopped at Court’s seat and handed some paper-wrapped item that looked like a bandage to Amy.

  Amy peeled back the top strip, revealing a sensor pad of some sort. She leaned in, pushed Court’s loose hair out of her face, and applied the sticky tape to her left temple.

  “They matched her already,” Amy said quietly through clenched teeth.

  The other woman, whose nametag read Eileen, unfurled a cord from the left armrest and fastened its end to the sensor pad. “Of course they did. Not going to let her work for long. They’ll get her pumped full of hormones and pregnant with triplets before she even has time to unpack her suitcase.”

  “Pregnant with… Wait, hormones? What?” Court’s hand flew to the sensor pad. She was going to pry it off and get the hell off that shuttle. “No. Wait—no. I’m a cop. I’m going to Jekh to work, not breed. I worked hard to qualify for relocation.”

  Amy grabbed Court’s hand and held it still. “Of course you did,” she whispered. “I don’t doubt that. They’re desperate for boots on the ground, but men are starting to get antsy. The officials keep delaying settlement for a number of reasons, but you’re not a settler. You’re essential personnel. You’re a two-fer. Cop first, broodmare as soon as they can manage to phase you out of your job.”

  “I refuse.”

  Both ladies straightened up and pulled winning grins onto their red-slicked lips as the captain paused at Court’s seat.

  “How’s it going, ladies?”

  “Oh, just fine, sir. Just fine,” Eileen said.

  Her chipperness was as phony as Monopoly money, and anyone with half a brain would have been able to tell. Apparently, the captain had the same eyesight affliction as Leonardo, because he didn’t seem to catch the artificiality in their too-wide smiles.

  “We about ready for launch? I hoped to get out of here before the air traffic controllers at Logan get bogged down with morning flights.”

  “We’ll be ready in five minutes, sir,” Amy said. “It’s just, we get so few ladies on the long trips.” She wrung her hands anxiously, more likely for the captain’s benefit than from actual nerves. Court knew the trick and used it on occasion herself. Sometimes, letting a man think he was the most dominant presence in the discussion was the easiest way to end a conversation. He’d go away sooner and argue less.

  “We always have to double-check the sensor placement for women. It wouldn’t do to get out in deep space and have the computer unable to monitor her.”

  The young captain rubbed his smooth chin and eyed Court critically from her boots up to her furrowed forehead. “Courtney McGarry…” he muttered, reading the name on the monitor affixed to the wall to her right. “McGarry.”

  Court kept her gaze locked on his and hoped he saw the warning in her eyes. She’d wanted to get off
Earth without having one more confrontation about what her grandfather had or hadn’t done, and she’d never lie. Yes. She was one of those McGarrys. One of the traitors.

  Go on and say something, asshole.

  “Only Bostonian here, huh?” he asked.

  When he looked down at his palm, Court looked at Amy and Eileen.

  Amy had a pretty impressive side-eye, but hers was nothing compared to Eileen’s nasty glare. They detested the man—that was evident—and probably for reasons Court could guess.

  Odious womanizer.

  She’d worked with a lot of whorish male cops, so she knew the type. They never even bothered to take off their wedding rings when they did their dirt.

  The captain clucked his tongue and batted a bit of fuzz off his shirt pocket. “Well, we do certainly hope you enjoy the flight, Ms. McGarry,” he said. “Don’t mind the ladies too much. They really are competent.” He laughed.

  The ladies did, too, but as before, the captain didn’t seem to notice the delay in their laughter or the falseness of their tones.

  He moved up the aisle.

  “The people on television lied,” Court muttered. “Any dimwit can fly a rocket ship.”

  “Any dimwit with the right connections.” Eileen leaned in and gave Court’s monitor screen a tap. “Look, there are ways to get bumped off the match list. And trust me, you don’t want to be on it.”

  “How do I get off?”

  Amy stood in the aisle nodding at this person and that person, and speaking calming assurances such as, “We’ll be on our way in just a moment, folks. Remember to make sure you breathe normally when the compound is pumped into your cubicle, okay?”

  Eileen’s fingers moved rapidly over the screen’s input area.

  Court read as fast as she could but couldn’t make sense of all the codes and responses. “What are you doing?” she whispered.

  “I’m just making a little programming shunt. Less suspicious.”

  “Less suspicious than what?”

  “Than all your records completely disappearing. That’ll give you some time to learn the system once you get to the other end. They won’t do anything to you without putting you through all those tests first. They like their broodmares healthy.”