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

  “I’m not a broodmare.”

  “And I’m trying to help keep you from becoming one. Let’s just call it insurance, okay?”

  Eileen straightened up and started to move away, but Court grabbed her hand. “Wait. Do I need to get off this shuttle?”

  Eileen gripped Court’s hand in both of hers and squeezed, saying nothing, but the suggestion was clear: Go.

  Up until that point, Court had never been afraid to go. The supposedly feral Jekhans didn’t terrify her. The Terrans who’d defeated them did.

  It’d taken one year for Terrans to adapt Jekhan space technology.

  It took five years after that to suppress the native Jekhan population on their home planet.

  It took ten years to rebuild the infrastructure on Jekh to something Terrans could recognize.

  In 2036, settlement on Jekh was supposed to begin in earnest, and Court was a part of it.

  Rock or hard place.

  For the past fifteen years, she’d had drilled into her that the McGarrys were traitors who’d hold their own kind back from advancement if they could—who’d stop humans from seizing their destiny, no matter how many light years away their fate was located.

  But they weren’t traitors; they were thinkers, and Court thought her grandfather had been right.

  “You go,” Eileen said. “Go with open eyes and question everything. Make it so I don’t have to say the same thing to others next year or the year after.”

  “I’m just one woman. That’s a tall order.”

  “You’re the only female LEO on a shuttle carrying fifty cops. If there’s anyone who could do the job, that person would be you.”

  Court dropped Eileen’s hand and then gripped the armrest. “Right. Me.”

  Eileen and Amy moved up the aisle and that infernal programmed voice piped into the cabin once again reminding them to continue breathing normally.

  Court had been before, but now her breaths were short and heart racing.

  Calm down, girl. Keep your head on.

  The shuttle took off, much as airplanes did. As always, Court closed her eyes and tried to convince herself that the turbulence didn’t mean anything. It’s just an air pocket. Just an air pocket. The words became a mantra for her. She was still whispering them to herself when a plastic wall cranked up from the floor between her seat and the aisle and locked her into an enclosed compartment.

  “Here we go,” she whispered. She opened her eyes and looked up upon hearing the hiss from the overhead vent. What looked like dust blew onto her in a sputter, then in a strong mist.

  She held her hand over her eyes, peeling her fingers back just enough to examine the filmy coating on her skin.

  Not dust.

  The particles were too large—too beady. Like tiny soda bubbles, but solid and pliant. She rubbed the coating between her fingers, and it adhered to her skin feeling cool and light.

  “Has to be the hydration compound.”

  The light material would fill her little compartment up to the ceiling much like Styrofoam packing peanuts in a shipping box, only organic, according to all the literature. The compound was designed to slow down body functions during the trip and make passengers’ emergence in a different atmosphere less traumatic. It’d keep them hydrated and nourished, and would work toward boosting their immune systems so they would have added protection against Jekh’s pathogens.

  “Shit’s getting real.”

  She pulled a deep breath in through her mouth and blew it out through her nose as she looked down at her now-covered boots. The material had filled in up to her shins. If she’d been like her sister, Erin, and prone to panicking in small spaces, Court would have been freaking out right about then.

  “They should have run simulations for this.”

  She finger-combed the material through her loose hair like all the instructions said, gathered the curly mess at her nape, and pulled it into a loose knot. The dust covered her lap and coated the monitor screen to her right.

  If stasis worked the way she was taught, she’d be asleep moments after the compound molded to her sinus passages. She wouldn’t be able to think or fret about anything, and maybe that was for the best.

  Thinking too much had always gotten her family into trouble.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Trigrian Beshni gave his lover Murki a shake and pressed his palm against the other man’s forehead.

  Clammy.

  Sick again. Not exactly a surprise, but demoralizing all the same. He kept hoping Murk would get well, and Trig was no optimist.

  “Murk. Wake up.”

  Murk didn’t move except to let out a long exhalation and turn his head toward the corner of the closet they’d been squatting in for weeks. He looked even more sallow than the day before. If Murk hadn’t been so ill, his orange hue may have prompted Trig to crack a joke or two. He looked a bit like a Jekhan squash.

  “Fuck.” Trig placed a cold compress on Murk’s forehead, tidied up the makeshift sleep pallet they shared, and then sat back on his heels.

  There was nothing more he could do, really. Murk’s body functions had taken a nosedive, and they’d both seen the signs and knew the shutdown was coming. Murk had been resigned about his fate. The cure for The Ague was impossible to acquire, so all Trig could do was keep him safe and comfortable.

  Trig worried, though, wondering who would take care of him when he had his turn with The Ague. Probably no one. All he had was Murk. In fact, Murk had been the closest thing to family he had since those Terrans arrived, but had been in his life for a decade before that. Murk’s parents had taken Trig and his siblings in after their parents died in a transport crash. He didn’t know where his siblings were anymore or if they were still alive. He hadn’t seen them in more than fifteen years—since he was in his early twenties.

  He’d been a full-grown man when the first wave of Terrans came. Back then, Jekhans vastly outnumbered the settlers, but now there was only a handful of his kind left. Most of them were herded into containment areas and ghettos “for their own good,” they’d said. Like they were unclean. Or dangerous. If they had been dangerous, even a little, they might not have been so easy to overtake. To scatter.

  Now, neither Trig nor Murk had families. Just each other.

  Two would have to be enough.

  Trig took the other man’s clammy left hand in his and massaged his palm. “We gotta go, Murk. We can’t stay here.”

  Murk didn’t always respond, but he still heard Trig, usually. Trig had to try to get through to him, because he couldn’t carry him out on his own. He was just too heavy, and Trig hadn’t been eating well. He’d hated going out to search for food knowing Murk could take a turn for the worse at any time, so Trig was starved, and weak as a little boy.

  “I heard some men upstairs earlier,” he continued. “I listened until they left. There’s a new load of settlers coming in tonight. Cops, they said. Remember that word? Police.”

  Of course, Murk would remember. He was the more educated of the two of them. Most of their kind spoke some Terran languages—especially the ones whose families were on those initial contact voyages to Earth.

  Trig relaxed onto his bottom and folded his legs, still rubbing Murk’s palm.

  Jekhans had been watching their Terran cousins for a very long time. The excitement on Jekh before they’d decided to finally make contact had been absolutely electric. Trig had probably been seven or eight at the time, but he remembered the hopefulness and how badly they wanted to share and bring these genetic relatives into their fold. Or be taken lovingly into theirs.

  Trig rolled his eyes.

  Extreme optimism was a character flaw of most Jekhans; one he had attempted to purge from himself for the better part of ten years.

  “We can’t stay in this closet, Murki. They’ve got this house set aside for someone.”

  Someones, probably. Settlers seemed to pair off quickly and started breeding immediately. Their fertility was astounding. They were lucky th
at their population was balanced in a way that easy proliferation was possible. Rather, the population was balanced on Earth, supposedly. They had the same number of men and women, unlike with the settlement population, which was predominantly male.

  Thanks to their Tyneali abductors, one of the major biological differences between Jekhans and Terrans were that Jekhan males’ semen was spermless unless the man had a compatible male partner. He needed the influence of another man’s hormones. The forced cooperation kept the gene pool strong, the books said. Perhaps it was useful for that, but that same alien genetic contamination made them ticking time bombs. The hormones screwed with their immune systems and made them susceptible to diseases they’d thought had been eradicated decades ago.

  They’d been wrong. Otherwise, Murk wouldn’t have Ague.

  Trig took stock of the little room they’d called home for the past three months. The little basement space was supposed to be what the floor plan Trig had stolen called a “walk-in closet.” A space dedicated especially to clothes and shoes—a concept Trig couldn’t quite wrap his brain around until he learned that Terrans had a proclivity to change their clothes daily. Even the earliest settlers had brought a few days worth of clothes.

  The closet had no windows and locked from the inside. Being desperate for a warm, dry place for his ailing lover, Trig had broken in late one night after the builders had gone home. No one ever checked that closet. The few times the crew had come downstairs, Trig and Murk had hidden behind the closet’s moveable wall in an even smaller space, taking along their few possessions.

  Trig didn’t look forward to pulling Murk through that space again if they needed to. Murk was dead weight, and Trig needed a week or more of good meals before he even thought about attempting that sort of labor. He hoped that whoever moved in wouldn’t check that closet so quickly. The house had three bedrooms upstairs, each with their own little vault for possessions.

  It was a palace.

  That closet had been Trig and Murk’s palace for three months. Compared to the space in slums set aside for Jekhans, that two-square-meter room was a sanctuary.

  Trig would have to find Murk another one. He’d worry about how he’d get Murk there later.

  ___

  Court could hardly focus on her commander’s pedantic tone. She couldn’t stop yawning—a side effect of coming out of stasis, apparently. Although she would have a couple of days to sleep off the trip and get her house in order, she had to jump a few hurdles before she’d be allowed to recuperate. She’d barely taken one step off the shuttle before Commander Festus barked for his twenty designated hires to line up for inspection.

  She pulled herself to attention when Festus stopped in front of her. Even shadowed by the bill of his black baseball-style hat, his narrowed eyes were cold. She should have been afraid of him, but women who had nothing to lose didn’t tend to be cowed by unimportant men with big egos.

  He stared into her eyes for so long that he seemed to be daring her to look away—for her to start off on the wrong foot and get kicked to the bottom of the totem pole on her very first day.

  Not today, asshole.

  If he were looking for that woman, he needed to look elsewhere to find her.

  She kept staring, unblinking, knowing how her own icy stare could unnerve a person. She’d used whatever she had in her arsenal to keep herself safe when she grew up, and often a look—a mean enough look—would make a man keep his distance. She might have been small, but she wasn’t an easy target.

  Festus didn’t so much look away as bring his holo-ring level to his face. One tap with his thumb to the metal encircling his middle finger initiated a screen on his palm. The technology wasn’t particularly new, but judging by his furrowed brow and scowl, he was flummoxed by it.

  She hoped he figured out how to work the damned thing soon and say what he needed to, because she suddenly had a very good idea of why she wasn’t supposed to eat or drink anything before the trip. Before going into stasis, she’d been fine. The moment she’d awakened after the stasis compound cleared out of her compartment, she’d needed to piss like a racehorse.

  She could see the ladies room from where she stood. Twenty meters away, and unlike the men’s room, there was no queue. Dropping her ass onto a cold toilet seat was going to be indescribable bliss, and she couldn’t wait.

  “McGarry,” Festus growled.

  She was going to have to wait.

  “Yes, sir.” She was afraid to swallow; fearing the liquid addition to her bladder would precipitate an embarrassing leak.

  “You’re due to report to your immediate supervisor Monday morning at oh-nine hundred,” Festus said. “You understand how the time system works here, don’t you?”

  “Twenty-six hour days”—another factoid that had been drilled into her ad nauseam—“yes, sir.”

  “You’ll need to complete paperwork and do firearms qualifications.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but did you say firearms qualifications?” She squinted at him. She couldn’t help herself. Sometimes, her face did whatever it wanted to when she couldn’t process lunacy. Qualifications? She wouldn’t have been there if she hadn’t already qualified.

  “I completed those on Earth, and more than satisfactorily.” She’d aced the motherfuckers, not just photon weapons, either—she could fire a real bullet into a moving target’s kill zone with ninety-five percent accuracy.

  Festus hadn’t made the same statement to any other LEO in that line. Leonardo certainly didn’t have scores as high as hers, and yet Festus hadn’t said shit to him.

  “I’ve got the scores here,” Festus said.

  Court cleared her throat and tried to stop grinding her teeth. During her last cleaning, the dentist suggested she’d need either a mouth guard or a muzzle soon. “What purpose would re-testing serve, sir?”

  He pulled his gaze from his holographic document, lowered his hand, and fixed her in that demeaning stare again. “Serves my purposes. How’s that?”

  Asshole.

  She blew a breath through her nose and curled her toes in her boots.

  She knew better than to respond, and instead, stood there with hands clasped at her back, trying not to think about her bladder or about whether her dog that had been transported in back of the shuttle had survived the trip. Court needed to wait for her dismissal from the lineup, and if she were lucky, she’d rarely have to see Festus on the job.

  “Oh-nine hundred, Monday,” he said.

  “Yes, sir. Oh-nine hundred.”

  He dismissed them all, and her fellow officers began moving to collect their smaller bags and coordinate with the relocation hosts, but Court waited until they’d dispersed. Nagging bladder or not, she looked and watched while she had a chance. She wouldn’t have a reason to visit the depot every day, but she figured knowing a little about what went on there wouldn’t hurt. She had so much to learn about Buinet.

  Many of the shuttles housed in the facility looked like short-distance jumpers good for trips of a couple of days, perhaps to the nearby space stations the Terrans shared with a few non-threatening species. Some of the vehicles, like The Cormorant, were for longer trips.

  There also seemed to be some short-term parking for solar vehicles.

  She started at the weight of a hand on her shoulder, and looked down to see the nails were delicate and coated in red lacquer.

  Amy moved around her and whispered, “This place neighbors a couple of major municipal buildings. There’s always extra security here.”

  “Ah.”

  Amy swatted some imaginary wrinkles from her jumpsuit, then nodded and smiled at the male LEOs passing by with their suitcases and duffels.

  Court winced. Gonna need to get a handcart or something. She didn’t even know where to meet her relocation liaison or if they’d arranged transportation to her house…wherever that was. All she knew about her assigned lodging was that the dwelling was large enough for a single woman and had facilities for her dog.

 
“I’m due to serve on the next run to Earth,” Amy whispered. “Shuttling some bureaucrats back and bringing in some scientists, the captain said. Usually I have a few weeks downtime, but this voyage starts tomorrow. There’s a bit of a learning curve to navigating Buinet, so I wanted to tell you that if you’re awake in time for breakfast in the morning, I know a little café that doesn’t get much foot traffic.”

  “Nearby?” Court turned slowly and counted the probable guard stations. Four obvious ones, plus some guards on foot making the rounds. They were treating the transportation center more like a military installment than a public service center, and she wanted to know why.

  “No, closer to the outskirts. You’ll have to hail a taxi if they didn’t arrange a car for you.”

  “The outskirts. You mean…in the slums?” That code was the same everywhere, and Court knew because she’d grown up in them.

  Amy’s gaze flitted to a man walking toward them carrying a tablet with MCGARRY lit up in big red text.

  Amy turned her back to the approaching man and mouthed, “Trust me.”

  Under normal circumstances, Court probably wouldn’t, but she was in a new place with no friends or family. She had to take some calculated risks.

  She nodded.

  “The café is called ‘Spilled Milk.’ See you at nine.” Amy retreated to the shuttle.

  “McGarry?” the man with the tablet called out, looking around.

  “Yes. I’m Courtney McGarry.” Court shifted her weight and glanced at the bathroom door. Still no line.

  “I was expecting Courtney to be a guy. And you are…definitely not that. Jesus Christ, you sure you’re a cop?” He eyed her as if she were the last steak in a butcher shop’s display.

  She let out a tired laugh. “Yeah. I’m sure.”

  “I’m here to collect you and take you to your new home.”

  Home. We’ll see about that.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Court crossed the threshold of her new house and set down her dog, Jerry. She stood in the doorway and took in the lease-to-own unit, disappointment tightening the muscles of her face.